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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 m

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.

Tenhundfeld 11y ago
Yeah, I think you're right. You make a good point about there being plenty of users of interesting tech everywhere, but the creators of interesting tech are rarely in the Southeast. I can't think of any big players really. To be fair to you, I was partially responding to a general attitude I find on HN that if you're not on the West Coast, then you're clearly not a real/good/respectable software developer – which is not what you were saying. And I'm probably somewhat biased by the awesomeness of my little town (Charlottesville, VA), which has interesting startups like VividCortex (creating awesome DB monitoring tools using Golang), RoomKey (since purchased but started here as a Clojure shop), Center for Open Science (creating frameworks and doing cool stuff in Python), etc. And people in my circle are committers to Elastic Search, Kafka, etc., but I acknowledge that's uncommon.
- devonkim 11y ago
  There's a fair chance I met you at a meet-up in the DC area, which smaller professional communities can be good for. I'm familiar with VividCortex and met a few engineers up there at DevOps DC. When there's less companies, it's easier to form tighter bonds and there's less chance for negative competition like in much denser areas of competing professionals. Charlottesville, VA is a sort of Sunnyvale, CA in my mind - it's about the same mental distance as the craziness going on in the real urban area up north of it, and it has some history with some access to capital (UVA / William & Mary alumni really). Heck, I considered moving there but I consider it still tough for local jobs without the relative drop in cost of living. Granted, where I moved it sunk potential income harder, but the even lower cost of living is critical when bootstrapping companies, and cheap craft beer is a perk few areas where you can buy a great house for under $200k can claim.

Tenhundfeld 11y ago

Yeah, I think you're right. You make a good point about there being plenty of users of interesting tech everywhere, but the creators of interesting tech are rarely in the Southeast. I can't think of any big players really. To be fair to you, I was partially responding to a general attitude I find on HN that if you're not on the West Coast, then you're clearly not a real/good/respectable software developer – which is not what you were saying. And I'm probably somewhat biased by the awesomeness of my little town (Charlottesville, VA), which has interesting startups like VividCortex (creating awesome DB monitoring tools using Golang), RoomKey (since purchased but started here as a Clojure shop), Center for Open Science (creating frameworks and doing cool stuff in Python), etc. And people in my circle are committers to Elastic Search, Kafka, etc., but I acknowledge that's uncommon.

devonkim 11y ago
There's a fair chance I met you at a meet-up in the DC area, which smaller professional communities can be good for. I'm familiar with VividCortex and met a few engineers up there at DevOps DC. When there's less companies, it's easier to form tighter bonds and there's less chance for negative competition like in much denser areas of competing professionals. Charlottesville, VA is a sort of Sunnyvale, CA in my mind - it's about the same mental distance as the craziness going on in the real urban area up north of it, and it has some history with some access to capital (UVA / William & Mary alumni really). Heck, I considered moving there but I consider it still tough for local jobs without the relative drop in cost of living. Granted, where I moved it sunk potential income harder, but the even lower cost of living is critical when bootstrapping companies, and cheap craft beer is a perk few areas where you can buy a great house for under $200k can claim.