These stories keep popping up, and they're all very encouraging. There was a post a while back about a startup in St Louis, another about Baltimore. There are a lot of excellent cities out there, and SF really is just too expensive (NY, too, but we're talking about tech).
I'm reminded of a quote by Patty Smyth: "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."
I really do think that tech needs to embrace the need to branch out. I understand SF is a great place to fund tech companies, and that VCs (and often CEOs) appear to prefer it.
But it is frustrating to see tech elites (I'm talking about the sort of people who get to pick up the phone and vent a bit to the elected leader of the world's largest military about their company's hiring woes) insist that there is a severe shortage of tech workers when they continue to create 110k a year jobs in a city where the median 3br house costs 1.1mil. I agree that SF should build more, but this isn't going to be the solution.
If you're offering 110K a year for developers in Detroit, Poughkeepsie, Baltimore, St Louis, Minneapolis and you can't find anyone, ok, maybe we can start talking about why and how the government can help. But if you're creating 110K a year jobs in a place where two full time workers are looking at roughly 50k in child care costs and a 1.1 mil bill for the median 3br house, well of course you're having trouble finding workers!
I wonder how much of SF's growth is forced by VCs, like what happened to my friend who recently got funded. He was DC based, and as a requirement from his VC he had to move to San Fran for a minimum of a year.
His conversations with me have been interesting, with the main point being that he has to pay WAY more for talent, space, everything. His main frustration is he doesn't need the mythical "10X" developers. He just needs people who can deliver, and has to fight for talent with dozens of apps which have premises so silly that he can't believe they are funded.
I got an offer the other day for 120k in SF. I did the math, and said no. I'd be better off taking a job for 85k in Austin.
And regarding Austin getting more expensive: There is a huge differentiator here. Austin has a booming housing market AND a booming development market. There is tons of new housing being built, and a lot of it is very interesting, moderate density in-fill development relatively close to the downtown core. There's one company building neo-traditional development neighborhoods in old strip mall locations where the houses all have solar panels and uber modern designs. They go for 270k for a 3 bedroom. Hardly exorbitant.
"I got an offer the other day for 120k in SF. I did the math, and said no. I'd be better off taking a job for 85k in Austin."
I'm a developer in St. Louis who thinks about this sort of thing all the time. Look, I like San Francisco. I'm there a few times a year and it's great. But is it $60k/year more in cost-of-living better than Kansas City or Austin or Pittsburgh? What if the difference in salary is only half that? I don't know, but I don't think it's obvious.
> I got an offer the other day for 120k in SF. I did the math, and said no. I'd be better off taking a job for 85k in Austin.
This is false. Have you checked actual rents and commutes in Austin rather than silly online calculators.
Yes, you get to avoid state tax in Texas. That is the primary advantage.
Rents within short commuting distance of downtown are ridiculous. Both IH35 and Mopac(Loop 1) have ridiculous traffic with no mass transit in sight. IH35 through Austin is actually acknowledged as a traffic nightmare in the same class as 101 and 405 in LA!
And, finally, you get to live outnumbered and surrounded in a state that wishes Austin would simply vaporize because it's full of "daymn libruls".
So, yeah, all that cheap housing is available. It's just a horrible commute from a community that likely hates your guts in a state that doesn't care.
Don't get me wrong. There is a lot to like about Austin. But this isn't 1996 when Austin really was 85% the cost of living of the rest of the country when I would fly in from California, buy a $4.95 submarine sandwhich and get back "3 feet" of food because I forgot where I was.
Your last statement is false. Texas has many large 'liberal' metropolitan cities. The state is now purple and a lot more open than people expect, the majority of the state advocates legalize cannabis and the mayor of Houston is gay. Austin actually used to be known for it's libertarian bent.
> Your last statement is false. Texas has many large 'liberal' metropolitan cities.
I agree with this. I've lived in Dallas for 10 years and I've seen a lot of change since I moved here in 2004. The later waves of Asian immigration and other folks fleeing the freezing Northeast winters is starting to make Texas a bit more blue these days.
On the flip side, housing is no longer cheap in many areas. If I were to buy a new home the same size as my current, 6 year old home, I would likely have to spend twice as much as I spent in 2008.
I was in Austin with a realtor. I have kids. I'm not trying to live in an apartment. I want at least a townhouse, if not a single-family home. The commute distances from extremely affordable homes in South Austin to downtown wasn't that bad, but let's keep something in mind: the vast majority of Austin's tech jobs aren't in downtown, they are actually scattered all over the city. The homes I was looking at were 15 minutes from the office.
There isn't a single place in the entire Bay Area that is remotely as affordable. Also, Austin is a buyers city. The rent to home price ratio clearly tilts towards buyer. This is because of the tremendous amount of development upping the supply of new homes for sale, but not for rent.
I saw the "Big SomethingOrOther", saw that it was $4.95, and ordered it without even thinking that $4.95 of sandwich in Austin was going to be huge compared to $4.95 of sandwich in Santa Clara.
Ah. I thought your "3 feet" reference might be a reference to Ben Franklin's request for a 3-penny loaf upon his arrival in Philadelphia from Boston...
"Then I walked up the street, gazing about till near the market-house I met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and, inquiring where he got it, I went immediately to the baker’s he directed me to, in Secondstreet, and ask’d for bisket, intending such as we had in Boston; but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I asked for a three-penny loaf, and was told they had none such. So not considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater cheapness nor the names of his bread, I made him give me three-penny worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I was surpriz’d at the quantity, but took it, and, having no room in my pockets, walk’d off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other.
This seems to happens a lot (the requirement to move to SF). This is a side note, but I think the VC-required move to sf is behind a lot of the "10 things I hate about SF" style blog posts that proliferated for a while there (and still show up every now and then).
A big part of this is that people used to find a way to move to SF because they wanted to live there. In a way, finding a job that allowed you to live in SF was like finding a job that allowed you to be a musician, or pursue an art. SF wasn't a horrible place to pursue a career, but it wasn't the alpha city either. Finance and Law? New York, London, maybe Chicago. Entertainment? LA. Fashion? NY or Paris. Truly career focused people probably went elsewhere. SF wasn't a complete backwater, you could still pursue a career here, but you were in SF because you wanted to live in SF.
High tech was around, but it wasn't nearly as big, or as culturally high profile, and it was heavily centered in the south bay. As a result, you really didn't have people here who didn't want to be here who had to put up with it anyway. And no doubt, there's a lot you have to put up with in SF, even if, on the balance, you really like it.
Sometimes these "SF != cool city" posts unfavorably compare SF to NY (in my opinion, we need a type of godwin's law here - SF should never be compared to NY, and whoever makes this comparison loses the argument immediately). In the past, we'd probably ask "then why are you here instead of NY?", except that we wouldn't get a chance to ask - none of this would have even happened, because he would be living in NY.
But now? He has to live in SF to get funding, and he's not happy about to be in SF, and from the reaction, I'd say nobody is particularly happy about it.
I'm reminded of a quote by Patty Smyth: "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."
http://gothamist.com/2010/05/03/patti_smith_suggests_finding....
I really do think that tech needs to embrace the need to branch out. I understand SF is a great place to fund tech companies, and that VCs (and often CEOs) appear to prefer it.
But it is frustrating to see tech elites (I'm talking about the sort of people who get to pick up the phone and vent a bit to the elected leader of the world's largest military about their company's hiring woes) insist that there is a severe shortage of tech workers when they continue to create 110k a year jobs in a city where the median 3br house costs 1.1mil. I agree that SF should build more, but this isn't going to be the solution.
If you're offering 110K a year for developers in Detroit, Poughkeepsie, Baltimore, St Louis, Minneapolis and you can't find anyone, ok, maybe we can start talking about why and how the government can help. But if you're creating 110K a year jobs in a place where two full time workers are looking at roughly 50k in child care costs and a 1.1 mil bill for the median 3br house, well of course you're having trouble finding workers!