Reno Wants to Be Silicon Valley's Back Office | Hacker News Reader

Reno Wants to Be Silicon Valley's Back Office

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66 pointsrck48 comments

Current Reno resident who has also lived in Silicon Valley and San Fransisco reporting in. Born and raised in Reno. Also have spent a significant amount of time in Austin.

Out of all 4 of those places, Reno is by far the most fun. Between the skiing, hiking and awesome bars the quality of life in Reno is unparalleled. We have a ton of amazing local bands. A burning man party is one of the craziest parties you will ever attend. The weather can be harsh compared to California, but I personally love it. It's hard for me to imagine living anywhere else.

Austin is fun, but is a swamp and overcrowded. San Francisco is also fun, but is incredibly overcrowded and expensive. SV is kind of boring, and too family-oriented for a young person.

The only problem in Reno is the job market. I know a lot of talented IT pros who have trouble finding a good job. Reno's economy is dominated by Casinos and Finance. Almost all of the talented programmer I know from Reno have wound up in SV or San Francisco. UNR isn't producing enough people trained in IT fields. The tech job market is anemic. Nepotism and the "Good Old Boys Club" run deep in the Reno economy. Nevada is much more corrupt than most states.

Reno will never be the next Silicon Valley or even the next Austin. We simply don't have an educational system to support it. The Bay-Area and Los Angeles are a huge brain drain on the Reno area. I think Bloomberg hit the nail on the head with deeming it "Silicon Valley's Back Office". Reno's place is a great place to do manufacturing and run data centers because of it's location and lower cost of doing business.

I will probably be moving to another city soon because I simply can't find a good job or enough work freelancing in my field (Front-End Web Development). Reno is my favorite place to live, but it's hard to take a ~50% pay cut to live here.

Another person lives in Reno also checking in. I grew up in the Silicon Valley though and recently moved here about 6 months ago. It indeed is really fun. Lot's of outdoorsy stuff to do (tons of unowned land where you can shoot guns and drive ATVs and stuff). The night life is crazy good too.

But yeah... it's fun in a kind of depressing way. There's a huge unemployment/underemployment problem here. My dad who was a crazy good broker in the valley is unemployed still after 3 years of living here. My mom who was a courier in the valley is now organizing greeting cards at grocery stores making minimum wage. They'd basically be screwed if they didn't have any savings and if I wasn't able to do remote work. There's also a TON of people who just fell off the face of the earth that moved here. I've never met so many meth heads, heroin addicts and general burnouts in a higher concentration anywhere else. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places though.

Reno is definitely is an cool place to live. But I don't think I would want to be here for longer than a year... that's just me though. I'm another one of those "California refugees", I guess. So maybe I shouldn't be talking.

My sense is Reno would need the equivalent of "a second UNR" to step up the quality of its job market. Perhaps a regional focus on alternative, post-K12 professional education would make sense? (It could become a center for in-person workshops, testing, etc to complement remote-learning MOOCs – it has the space and transport links.)

Proximity to the Bay Area is a double-edged sword: cultural affinity and talent interchange but also brain-drain.

As long as the skyline is dominated by casinos – while eye-catching in its own way – Reno's external image will suffer from that association. Reno can't compete with Vegas in scale, nor with the spread of state-by-state gambling in convenience, and yet is still hit by the stigma of gambling-as-an-economic-pillar.

Some of the downtown conversions of defunct casino-towers to other uses (like condos) are encouraging. If I were a local civic planner, I'd be tempted to offer a subsidy for any skyline-altering night signage that's not gambling-related. (Tesla! UNR! Aviation! Anything! There's still some risk people would see bright lights and think, "tacky gambling", no matter the actual messages.)

Wow. Austin "overcrowded". It has less that 2500people/sq mi. I've heard it all now.

I think overcrowding really means congestion to most people. Any quick population spike will cause congestion as infrastructure takes time to scale.

Some forms of congestion:

1. Traffic

2. Reduced parking

3. Waiting at restaurants longer

4. Housing and living costs becoming quickly unaffordable

5. Longer commutes and travel times.

6. More noise

If it had higher density, it would probably be less congested since people wouldn't need to drive to get to the corner store.

Needing a car to survive is the reason I left Austin

Probably referring to the denser portions, you know, where the enormous university and Texas government are?

Could you elaborate on Reno's weather? I read the climate section on Reno's Wikipedia page but it's hard to get a good sense of the actual weather.

High desert next in rain shadow of Sierras, so very dry, very little rain, sometimes snows significantly, but never that cold or hot. Big temperature swing between day and night. Often windy, sometimes ridiculously so. Not exactly climate, but sometimes there's smoke from forest or brush fires (and brush fires are a big problem in summer).

Source: grew up in Reno

It doesn't rain often, maybe four days a month. The sky is usually pretty clear. Summers are in the upper 80s. Winters are in the 30s. The growing season is from late May to late September because there are random cold snaps during the spring and fall. It's really dry, so you might get nosebleeds on visiting, but you can get used to it in a few days. The winds can be crazy: it can get up to 70 MPH every couple years, but 30 MPH happens relatively often. We haven't had a good snow in a few years, because of the drought in California.

Have you looked into remote work? I love Reno and have been remote working here at several different companies for many years. Right now, it's fairly easy to get a good front-end web dev gig remotely that pays much closer to SV salaries than Reno ones.

Reno has really blossomed even in the last few years, but the jobs market, especially for skilled people, is abysmal. There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem as well since many people with enough talent realize that Reno's salaries are laughable and end up leaving. Right now there's not enough decent paying work to attract people to the city, but if you where to bring a company here that paid sane wages you'd have a hard time finding talent. I've known enough amazing UNR grads that migrate to the Bay to know that this city does have the potential. It's just a matter of that right window of a reasonable paying company being here and snatching up enough bright people before they move to the Bay.

But for remote work it's hard to think of a better place. Cost of living is very low, there's no state income tax, and SF is an easy 3 1/2 hour drive when you miss parts of the big city experience. Every other major West Coast city is a cheap and quick flight. And there are some really amazing people in this city. If you don't go already, head to Hack Night at the Reno collective some time, it's a great group.

I would be interested in working with remote front end web developer. Can you share your email?

Add gmail to my username

There's tech companies planning to add a little hope for Vegas and Reno alike with datacenters being opened up in the area due to the super low costs while still maintaining some general proximity to southern California.

Unfortunately, all these announcements of companies opening up datacenters in random, low-cost areas of the US such as North Carolina seem to imply that these will bring the same sort of tech jobs as Silicon Valley in some way when this is pretty unlikely to actually add permanent jobs that are much more than commodity McDonalds-level employment. Modern datacenters are basically fancy warehouses and are engineered for maximum autonomous operation (I think we have robots that can rack & stack 1U and 2U boxes now actually depending upon server vendor). These places are typically being constructed by people barely making more than minimum wage and can barely spell Cisco, and they're not going to be the ones actually running anything either except occasionally fixing up shoddy work that probably doesn't even meet the really relaxed electrical and commercial building codes.

But once these DCs are up and the cables installed, they're managed pretty much remotely as a rule and the jobs of racking and stacking are fast disappearing. Sometimes your network guy has to drive out to the DC, sometimes people engineer around entire racks failing due to a PDU going down, anything to avoid putting a higher-paid engineer on the ground there. There's almost no Fortune 500 I know of that has a datacenter that isn't trying to decommission most of theirs, so while each DC being raised up is theoretically more jobs in disadvantaged areas, this comes at the cost oftentimes of losing 2-3 more datacenters with 2-3 times more jobs in slightly higher costs of living areas like Missouri, southern Virginia, Michigan, and Indiana.

Most people in Reno aren't stupid enough to believe that opening a DC will bring tech jobs. The city council certainly hopes they are though. Reno has been courting the Bay Area tech companies for over 20 years with no success. This is a PR puff piece.

> with no success.

Not entirely.

"In addition to confirming that the gigafactory will employ 6,500 full-time employees, Tesla also raised its average wage estimate to $26.16 per hour.

Full-time staffing for the gigafactory will comprise of:

4,550 production associates paid $22.79 per hour 200 material handlers paid $22.79 per hour 460 equipment technicians paid $27.88 per hour 360 quality technicians paid $27.88 per hour 930 engineers and senior staff paid $41.83 per hour.

Wages paid by Tesla for the gigafactory will total $353.6 million per year at full employment. The figure does not include construction jobs for building the plant. Tesla partner Panasonic already started listing jobs related to the gigafactory."

http://www.rgj.com/story/money/reno-rebirth/2014/10/23/tesla...

The Tesla factory is not in Reno and will not benefit Reno. Neither are the majority of manufacturing facilities that have opened here recently. If you are a welder I can can get you a job making between $25-50 per hour depending on your certifications in about ten minutes. If you are a programmer you'll be hard pressed to find a job paying market rate.

> If you are a programmer you'll be hard pressed to find a job paying market rate.

If you're a programmer, work remote and disconnect your wage from your geography.

As an engineer with a remote job, you will be unlikely to get certain kinds of jobs that have the same sort of pay-off that people get locally. If I was a remote worker for Facebook or Google, I wouldn't be able to use the cafeteria, and most start-ups in early stage tend to want people onsite where they can talk to each other much more. Furthermore, companies seem to pay significantly more just to have you on-site. In contrast, I've noticed most of the remote jobs I've applied to just aren't as good in compensation as ones onsite. I can easily find a random job as a senior engineer for $160k+... but it's really hard to find that as a remote worker. The extra $20-$40k / yr does add up even if you're in a significantly lower cost of living area.

> I can easily find a random job as a senior engineer for $160k+... but it's really hard to find that as a remote worker. The extra $20-$40k / yr does add up even if you're in a significantly lower cost of living area.

I don't believe the $60K+ more a year ($160K SFBA vs $100K remote) makes a SFBA job a net positive, considering how substantially higher the cost of living is. Equity, of course, is always a lottery ticket.

>>Furthermore, companies seem to pay significantly more just to have you on-site.

That's because they are usually located in places with high cost of living.

It's ~25 minutes east of downtown Reno; much of the workforce will live in Reno/Sparks.

Expectations here are that the vast majority of people employed there will probably choose to, or already will be living in Fernley. The ties to Reno in the press are more about the name and the fact that it's the largest population center in this area.

Historically, tech companies did this by offering to relocate existing companies, not necessarily by hiring additional workers in the area as a priority. Tons and tons of people following the first dot com were asked to relocate to specifically North Carolina and Texas and take paycuts. That caused basically a mass exodus until these companies relented and let people keep their Bay Area salaries. Thing is, the cost of living difference was so much that a senior developer was getting more than half the executives in the area and could afford basically any property listed.

A North Carolina relocation is a large part of the story in The Soul of a New Machine.

Why does Tesla need all that direct labor in a battery plant? Battery production is usually highly automated. They're building a single item in large quantities. That's a job for hard automation. Here's a video of the Nissan Leaf battery plant.[1] It's all special-purpose machines and robots. There are a few people walking around. That plant has maybe 250 employees. The largest auto assembly plant in the US, Ford's at Kansas City, has 3700 employees.

I doubt Tesla will ever reach that headcount. It's probably just PR to get deals from Nevada.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBboW2Sw3Co

One thing a large datacenter project does give your town is the potential ability to tax a big chunk of relatively immobile capital.

How immobile is it? The building can't move. But from what I can tell, servers depreciate quite rapidly. If your town decides to exploit the DC too badly, you'll get a nice chunk of change for a few years. Meanwhile the owner will stop replacing servers in that location and rebuild in a location without unfriendly natives.

This is in direct contradiction to the numerous articles showing these kinds of economically disadvantaged areas giving so many tax credits that the companies will pay basically nothing in taxes to put a DC there. I'd say that these municipalities are so desperate for jobs of any sort they're willing to take almost nothing in taxes just to have a big DC show up by some big name tech company once and give blue collars jobs for even a year or so. You're not going to see big cities be able to do that kind of a desperate move for jobs, but for a lot of rural areas they might be able to swing the money.

Thing is that Nevada doesn't have a state income tax, so the hope is that the working age population in the area won't be discouraged enough to completely leave. Random towns in Texas are similar due to no income tax at state level. North Carolina, however, does have a mixed income of state taxes, moderate sales tax, and fairly low real estate taxes.

Meanwhile, start-ups and small businesses in general will get almost none of the same kind of treatment, so companies that are struggling to grow due to lack of capital are forced into areas closer to their investors, whom being wealthy, tend to gravitate toward higher cost areas of living.

in one of our datacenter facilities with multiple cages i.e. hundreds of servers and networking gear to support, the onsite work is less than 10 hours a week. almost all failures are engineered against. one of our co-founders just goes there one afternoon per week since he lives nearby. he says it's nice to get out of the office occasionally. it's basically just rack/stack/wire/replace.

as we move into more software automation the job will be less hours as failures will no longer be time sensitive. maybe one visit every month.

i've never personally seen a robot in a datacenter so i'm not sure how the physical aspects are being automated but it's fairly low wage work so i figure it will take a long time before putting robots in DCs is cost effective.

having said all that, it still requires someone smart onsite to know wtf is going on when something is seriously broken or needs to be built right the first time around.

In this vein, somebody, at some point, needs to investigate how precisely IBM and EA bamboozled Baton Rouge and LSU that they were bringing "tech jobs" there. LSU even gave EA two whole floors of an on campus building (the Digital Media Center) built largely with disaster relief money to host...wait for it...their video game testers.

We can now sleep soundly knowing our federal tax dollars went to ensure the quality of the next Battlefield and Sims releases.

It's easy, politicians are always looking for good news. Metrics like "jobs created" get cranked out of some model based on dollars invested.

Reno is an awesome town. Most of the people I've talked to who have been to Reno have only ever seen the "trashy" casinos and run-down areas along S Virginia St., but if you dig deeper you'll find there's much more depth. They have an up and coming art scene, some great restaurants and bars, and perhaps most importantly a population of passionate and extremely friendly people who absolutely love their town and want it to succeed. Go Reno!

When visiting Reno when I was living in San Francisco. I see huge potential for that city. But it would need to invest in incentivizing startups to grow out of Reno vs the bay area which is a 3hr drive.

If UNR has a CS department then it needs to reach-out to it's current student body and make considerations for creating a market for tech in Reno.

UNR has a tiny CS department. There is a small startup community in Reno but it's not very developed and there's not a ton of support for it. If you've been in a hackerspace in SF and then visit the one in Reno you'd be hard pressed to say they were the same thing. It's also hard to find any startups that are doing anything interesting here.

I appreciate the insight!

The innovation sector is not limited to software/internet businesses. There is also digital entertainment, advanced machining/robotics, and bio pharmaceuticals.

With the announcement of Tesla's gigafactory in the greater Reno area I would make this the best opportunity to create an intersection of innovation that Reno can be starting point for.

Maybe Reno should host a tech conference. Or even the next formula-e race circuit. Just ideas. I see so much potential for Reno. :-D

Very late response to your comment here (sorry) so I doubt you'll see it but I wanted to respond anyway.

There are VERY interesting things going on in Reno, especially at UNR. MEMS research, solar cell research, biology, biotech, computer vision etc. There's also Sierra Nevada Corp in Sparks which was founded by two former UNR graduate students and is a very successful aerospace company. They are working on their own re-usable space craft in the dream chaser project: http://www.sncspace.com/ss_space_exploration.php Robocoin (bitcoin atm) is here but it's been rather disappointing.

One of the big flaws with this area is that casino gaming and mining have been the biggest draws on the talent pools for engineering. Gaming isn't the big money maker for the state that it once was and innovation wasn't a huge part of the business in the first place.

Downtown is trashy and rundown. The riverfront has been redeveloped and they make an effort to hide the homeless but the actual problems here aren't being addressed at all. Midtown has as many businesses (especially bars and restaurants) closing as it does opening. Those great commercial real estate rates aren't going to last and some business that make mid town what it is are already moving around/out because of increasing rates. Wages here are depressed and the median family income is low when compared to the cost of housing, transportation and food. There are also not many job opportunities should you need to change jobs. The recent sale of IGT has started another exodus of tech workers which are already in high demand and low supply. You won't see local businesses raising wages to attract or retain these people though.

I graduated from UNR in Computer Science and had the good fortune of finding a great job in Reno. Rent is incredibly cheap, the average commute time to get anywhere is 15 minutes (I80 and US395 intersect the city), there's no income tax, there's every type of recreation you could want within a 45 minute drive... I could go on. Downtown can still appear pretty trashy, like the article states. I suppose that's the nature of having big casinos there, but I hope it is able to clean itself up.

I could sing Reno's praises all day, and I count myself very lucky that I was able to find a good job here. I have incredibly high hopes for the future of this city, a lot of great things are happening!

I was there 4 years ago and I liked how you could bike everywhere. That was surprising to me.

The weather was also great for the days I was there.

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of job do you have? Programming I assume?

Reno averages just over 250 sunny days a year. Being in the eastern shadow of the Sierras and at ~4500 ft (4505 ft at the university) does lead to heavy snow which makes the roads unusable for bikes. Public transportation is not sufficient for most people. The drought has made this not much of an issue the last few years though. This is high mountain desert so you can have very hot days and very cold nights. There is a good mixture of weather and we get most of the four seasons. There are many great outdoor activities nearby with the Pacific Rim Trail and Lake Tahoe as two good examples. It's a nice place to have a family but it also has a large number of problems that are not being addressed.

In 2001 I built a data center in Reno thinking it was inevitably going to see an economic boom. Well, to be more specific, I purchased a half-completed data center abandoned by Adelphia after they went bust and completed it. Long story short, I lost my shirt and sold it two years later. I've lived in Reno on-and-off ever since, including a three year stint in the Bay Area startup scene. I'm still waiting for that economic boom. I've also lived in the Sacramento area and seen similar economic issues to Reno, only on a larger scale. If Sacramento can't make the proximity to the Bay Area work -- there's little hope for Reno. Hope I'm wrong about that.

What's the problem, talent?

Well, Reno already is home to Apple's tax dodg^W^Winvestment subdivision, Braeburn Capital. So, more companies coming in to having to pay decent wages only makes sense.

It's not just apple. Microsoft Licensing is in Reno for a reason. They have an actual building and employees unlike Apple but they have the same intent. Halliburton is another name everyone would recognize that has a shell here. There are tens of thousands of business registrations in Nevada to take advantage of the business friendly tax laws.

It's interesting to see how many places in the world are trying to bring about their own Startup Row esque thing. Interesting to see where it will flourish.

Startup tech operates in a traded economy. It can flourish anywhere, it just needs a couple key items for it to sustain the culture.

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