Altimor

OP — I’m not that privy to the details of what in the world was running on that MacBook Air, but I’m 100% sure it wasn’t “the production servers for Uber eats Canada.” It was some kind of hack doing some kind of thing on a recurring basis to make sure the service continued. These things were often hacked together by engineers, and sometimes ops people, in the middle of outages, as a stop gap.

Author of the post here — I agree that the "how" might be what's missing the most. The point I'm trying to make with the post is really more of a "what" question. I sometimes talk to entrepreneurs who want to outsource their distribution through some creative channels. I'm arguing that one should fight as hard as they can to keep owning that relationship with the end customer, and that this may indeed be close to the only thing that matters in the whole chain.

That also explains why startups that have "just" a bunch of users, and no revenue, are still able to raise at massive valuations. Sure the proximate cause is that they'll be able to monetize that attention at some point — but the deeper insight is that attention is inherently valuable, because it's upstream of everything. Every transaction starts with a person paying attention to something.

Yes I've noticed this trend as well. Other examples of companies moving from the Bay Area include Expensify (Pittsburgh) and Indinero (Pittsburgh too I think, and the Philippines).

I think that's tragic, as there are strong network effects in ecosystems like Silicon Valley — everyone would benefit from all the talent and capital being in the same place! Studies show that cities get more productive, creative and ecological as they get larger.

That said, even with that trend going on, I still think Silicon Valley will remain by far the #1 tech ecosystem in the US 20 years from now. It just has too strong of a tail wind at this point (the network effects I mentioned above). People have been predicting its demise for about 30 years now. Maybe this time is different, but so far it's always done well for itself.

This kind of comment is exactly what we're referring to. I'm sorry to be blunt, but it's so false that I wonder if it's a parody. SF's government is one of the most left wing of the entire country. Taxes are very high, the economy is extremely regulated (getting a building permit can easily take 6-10 years) and there's a ton of public aid.

Exactly. Travel especially seems much cheaper on Bay Area salaries! I know some people who moved to India, and told me that they'd actually be "richer" once accounting for cost of living. Except they can't leave now, every trip abroad is months of salary.

Meant the silver lining* (ESL here)

I hate SV politics too. The upside is: the kind of conversations you can have behind closed doors is very different from what you hear on the public place :)

I mean, arguably people make their choices because they assume they're the best given their conditions. It's not like it was totally random. Isn't it worth sharing the advice with people in similar conditions?

I've noticed that as well. The problem is Glassdoor very rarely actually includes stocks (though they say they do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). All my friends making $400k+ make more than 50% of that in stocks.

As individuals, we look at the world through a microscope, so all personal experience is anecdotal. But these $400k+ earning SEs are a double-digit percent of the engineers I know with 6+ years of experience (N > 10).

(OP) Yeah maybe I should have made my position more explicit regarding these downsides. I think they're real and annoying; but all cities have their downsides (eg Paris is gloomy all the time and people are insanely grumpy), and that getting a 100-200% salary increase is worth suffering the dirty streets and dysfunctional public infrastructure.