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All of those places have international airports except Knoxville, Richmond, Tampa, and Alabama. My point is mostly about having sufficient population density th

All of those places have international airports except Knoxville, Richmond, Tampa, and Alabama. My point is mostly about having sufficient population density that an international airport is justifiable for the region, and that spurs sufficient mass of high quality information-centric jobs rather than primarily jobs low on the capitalist value chain. To further elaborate and simultaneously move the fence posts (but was part of my snarky intent) is that the tech jobs that are in these places aside from mobile software are almost always ones people on HN overwhelmingly do not want. These jobs are disagreeable from either an ideological perspective (defense, oil) or ambitious career perspective (industry-specific CMS apps, subcontracting support / maintenance on legacy applications, outsourced enterprise J2EE development, IT). To me, the equivalent of "there's tech jobs all over the place in the US" is "there's jobs all over Craigslist, why are you complaining about lack of jobs?" Trust me when I say that most of the jobs I've seen outside areas with strong tech sector presence are likely not very good "tech" jobs. There's absolutely exceptions, but they are oases in the Sahara desert to me.

ghaff 11y ago
I suppose it's hard to argue with you if your point is that their aren't many SV-style mobile/web app companies outside of Silicon Valley. There are, however, a lot of software and other engineering jobs in many southern cities (e.g. Austin, Raleigh) albeit probably fewer than in the Northeast and the West coast.
- devonkim 11y ago
  There's a number of local companies doing their own regional form of SV companies though that's an increasing trend that could reverse the gold rush to big cities. For example, a local company here is more popular than GrubHub (http://valetgourmet.com http://valetgourmet.com). A lot of smaller municipalities (Asheville is a good example) have a cultural distaste for using services and products from outside the area due to the lack of a strong local economy and becoming potentially corporate colonies, so a lot of these companies are intentionally low market cap because they have more humble concerns than getting big, raising a bunch of funding, and retiring at 30. It's part of why I like it here, but the lack of ambition has a double edged sword resulting in a cap on quality that is typical for most places. What's becoming something a little alarming is that even those of us that want to stay away from big cities are being lured back with pretty insane comp packages / opportunities back in big cities, so brain drain is still an issue while (investment) capital is centered around big cities.
Tenhundfeld 11y ago
I agree that population density is the key point. The South inarguably has lower population density overall, but my point is there are plenty of urban areas dense enough to have healthy tech sectors with "good tech jobs". I live in Virginia. I lived in Alabama for a long time. I have friends who are good, solid developers living throughout the Southeast using technologies like Ruby on Rails, Go, Clojure, Node.js, Elastic Search, Cassandra/Spark, etc. Sure, some are consulting gigs, but plenty are startups. And none are for ideologically-questionable industries, unless you include NASA in defense. My "anecdata" does not disprove what you're saying, but your statement doesn't mean much to me when you add qualifiers like "outside areas with strong tech sector presence." Sure, you're going to have fewer options for jobs in rural areas, but isn't that true everywhere? In other words, the South has lower population density overall, but it still has areas of high population density, i.e., cities. And in my experience, the jobs in the Southern cities are no worse than jobs in other cities. You can find smart people using new exciting technology to solve interesting problems all over the South.
- devonkim 11y ago
  I think we agree overall, just some nuances and me being a pompous jerk. The people that make node.js, ES, Cassandra, Clojure, etc. are not in these areas so much - plenty of users of technology all over the world (pretty sure South Africa has RoR users and Arduino hackers). Compared to the relative population sizes of these metro areas to, say, just SF and NY (let's exclude Seattle and even Boston) there is a clear and obvious lack of comparable companies like those making OSes, databases, compilers, etc. in the Southeast (the Northwest is overweight considering how few people live there compared to the rest of the country). Integration is pretty common, and that's one of the areas of software that is kind of plug and chug and mostly innovative in a business sense rather than technology. For relative population sizes counting, we should have one company in the Southeast like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. But there just isn't. Heck, Zappos is in Vegas but they were moved there last I remember (but is Zappos a tech company? I dunno actually). But I must insist on distinguishing between companies that make revenue from tech and companies that use tech to make revenue, and that this business driver creates major differences in the distribution and attractiveness of job opportunities available for tech folks. It's the difference between the very typical non-tech companies that outsource all their software development for key products to the South for cost reasons while their sales folks and executives' families stay in the Bay Area and those that are paying $400k+ in comp packages for world-class Javascript developers they scour from all over the world. I'd like to pull some hard numbers, but laziness prevails here. Searching through jobs before in the past before I moved between the West and Southeast, your boring J2EE job is 80% of the software jobs in software in the Southeast, but it's maybe only 30% of the jobs in the Bay Area. The mere presence of good software jobs (and middle class jobs) is not what I'm debating though but the relative number, and that (the real questionable assertion to me) that this spills over to lack of other middle-class jobs in comparison that are also related to the capitalist value chain.
logfromblammo 11y ago
Having moved to the South mid-career, I have to agree that there are lots of jobs here, but most of them are undesirable for one reason or another. For most of the tech jobs in the region, there will be plenty of competent co-workers, but your lords and masters will be mostly clueless. But I also have to correct your knowledge of airports. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham%E2%80%93Shuttlesworth_International_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham%E2%80%93Shuttleswor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville_International_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville_International_Airpo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_International_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_International_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_International_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_International_Airport Of the list you provided, only Knoxville does not have an international airport.

ghaff 11y ago

I suppose it's hard to argue with you if your point is that their aren't many SV-style mobile/web app companies outside of Silicon Valley. There are, however, a lot of software and other engineering jobs in many southern cities (e.g. Austin, Raleigh) albeit probably fewer than in the Northeast and the West coast.

devonkim 11y ago
There's a number of local companies doing their own regional form of SV companies though that's an increasing trend that could reverse the gold rush to big cities. For example, a local company here is more popular than GrubHub (http://valetgourmet.com http://valetgourmet.com). A lot of smaller municipalities (Asheville is a good example) have a cultural distaste for using services and products from outside the area due to the lack of a strong local economy and becoming potentially corporate colonies, so a lot of these companies are intentionally low market cap because they have more humble concerns than getting big, raising a bunch of funding, and retiring at 30. It's part of why I like it here, but the lack of ambition has a double edged sword resulting in a cap on quality that is typical for most places. What's becoming something a little alarming is that even those of us that want to stay away from big cities are being lured back with pretty insane comp packages / opportunities back in big cities, so brain drain is still an issue while (investment) capital is centered around big cities.

Tenhundfeld 11y ago

I agree that population density is the key point. The South inarguably has lower population density overall, but my point is there are plenty of urban areas dense enough to have healthy tech sectors with "good tech jobs". I live in Virginia. I lived in Alabama for a long time. I have friends who are good, solid developers living throughout the Southeast using technologies like Ruby on Rails, Go, Clojure, Node.js, Elastic Search, Cassandra/Spark, etc. Sure, some are consulting gigs, but plenty are startups. And none are for ideologically-questionable industries, unless you include NASA in defense. My "anecdata" does not disprove what you're saying, but your statement doesn't mean much to me when you add qualifiers like "outside areas with strong tech sector presence." Sure, you're going to have fewer options for jobs in rural areas, but isn't that true everywhere? In other words, the South has lower population density overall, but it still has areas of high population density, i.e., cities. And in my experience, the jobs in the Southern cities are no worse than jobs in other cities. You can find smart people using new exciting technology to solve interesting problems all over the South.

devonkim 11y ago
I think we agree overall, just some nuances and me being a pompous jerk. The people that make node.js, ES, Cassandra, Clojure, etc. are not in these areas so much - plenty of users of technology all over the world (pretty sure South Africa has RoR users and Arduino hackers). Compared to the relative population sizes of these metro areas to, say, just SF and NY (let's exclude Seattle and even Boston) there is a clear and obvious lack of comparable companies like those making OSes, databases, compilers, etc. in the Southeast (the Northwest is overweight considering how few people live there compared to the rest of the country). Integration is pretty common, and that's one of the areas of software that is kind of plug and chug and mostly innovative in a business sense rather than technology. For relative population sizes counting, we should have one company in the Southeast like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. But there just isn't. Heck, Zappos is in Vegas but they were moved there last I remember (but is Zappos a tech company? I dunno actually). But I must insist on distinguishing between companies that make revenue from tech and companies that use tech to make revenue, and that this business driver creates major differences in the distribution and attractiveness of job opportunities available for tech folks. It's the difference between the very typical non-tech companies that outsource all their software development for key products to the South for cost reasons while their sales folks and executives' families stay in the Bay Area and those that are paying $400k+ in comp packages for world-class Javascript developers they scour from all over the world. I'd like to pull some hard numbers, but laziness prevails here. Searching through jobs before in the past before I moved between the West and Southeast, your boring J2EE job is 80% of the software jobs in software in the Southeast, but it's maybe only 30% of the jobs in the Bay Area. The mere presence of good software jobs (and middle class jobs) is not what I'm debating though but the relative number, and that (the real questionable assertion to me) that this spills over to lack of other middle-class jobs in comparison that are also related to the capitalist value chain.

logfromblammo 11y ago

Having moved to the South mid-career, I have to agree that there are lots of jobs here, but most of them are undesirable for one reason or another. For most of the tech jobs in the region, there will be plenty of competent co-workers, but your lords and masters will be mostly clueless. But I also have to correct your knowledge of airports. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham%E2%80%93Shuttlesworth_International_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham%E2%80%93Shuttleswor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville_International_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville_International_Airpo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_International_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_International_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_International_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_International_Airport Of the list you provided, only Knoxville does not have an international airport.