10 ms·

"a well-governed San Francisco could have positioned itself as the next NYC. The hub where all of tech gathers, the same way all of finance gathered in Wall St.

by timr 11y ago

"a well-governed San Francisco could have positioned itself as the next NYC. The hub where all of tech gathers, the same way all of finance gathered in Wall St. Replace the 70 year old 2-storey homes with Manhattan style apartment buildings, and rent in San Francisco would have remained very reasonable, despite the rapid economic growth. This would have prevented exactly this problem where tech workers are forced to disperse to other mini-hubs, due to lack of capacity in San Francisco." ...or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere. The cost of living here is the invisible hand of the market showing you that you're making a mistake by locating your company in the bay area. Yet the dominant techno-nerd narrative continues to be that the bay area has somehow made a mistake in not anticipating the bizarre fetish that global wealth has developed for local real estate since the early 1990s. It's insane that an industry of otherwise-intelligent people insists on cramming itself onto a tiny peninsula with seismic development challenges, and I chuckle every time someone draws the comparison to New York, which has seven times the land area, a capable and efficient transit system that has been developed over more than a century...and one of the highest costs of living in the world. Development is not a panacea. I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros, where you can't get a good meal after 9:30. Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence.

ebiester 11y ago
I've thought about that, but as far as I can tell, it means about $10-$15k of equipment and a dedicated work room. I need a mobile-connected "smart" whiteboard for every team member, a good microphone, webcam, speakers, a separate computer + monitor devoted to video conferencing, and a team that is geographically dispersed rather than partially-colocated. ...and hopefully, everyone has first class redundant internet, something not guaranteed across the nation.
- timr 11y ago
  I'm not suggesting that you have to have a distributed team -- though, you certainly can, and $10-$15k is trivial compared to the economic penalty of hiring good engineers in SF. I'm just saying: consider locating your company somewhere else. There are great engineers all over the world, and most of your customers are not here.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    They aren't in the valley for customer nor for techies, but for easy vc money access brought by locally connections. For now.
    - timr 11y ago
      Well, that's an aspect of it. But there's a heaping helping of cargo-cult superstition, too. For example, ask an entrepreneur to consider locating their office in Oakland: it's becoming more "acceptable" now that Uber has committed to a huge space over there, but a year or two ago, I had people telling me that locating in Oakland was the equivalent of wanting your company to die. For being a 20-minute BART ride from downtown SF. People have lost their minds. Also, of course, few around here believe that there are good programmers outside of the city. Mostly, though, I think it's about 20-somethings who want to feel like they've made it because they're running a startup in the most expensive city in the country. The cult is powerful, for such a group of disruptive, innovative thinkers.
- im_down_w_otp 11y ago
  The difference in competitive salary for me between SF and PDX (where I live) is ~$70k. Which you have to pay yearly, not as a one-time discounted cost. In fact even down at the very, very low-end of tech-related jobs (~$50k in PDX) the difference between SF and PDX is ~$18k. There is literally no shape of tech-oriented business you could operate where having to spend only $15k per employee when they're onboarded isn't a net financial benefit compared to having to pay SF-area competitive salaries for the same positions.
- ksenzee 11y ago
  The only hard requirements are a good headset and decent Internet. And when I say "decent," I don't mean "fabulous." I worked remote for five years, three time zones away from headquarters, and never even thought of getting a mobile-connected smart whiteboard. It might have been nifty, but it's by no means a requirement. The main requirement is that everyone communicate over the same channels. No planning sessions at the watercooler. Take it back to your desk and have the conversation in Slack instead.
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  I hope that by "mobile-connected smart whiteboard for every team member" you mean "laptop or tablet with touchscreen, and a stylus". You shouldn't need most of the rest of that, either. Make sure everyone has a 2nd monitor, and you'll need to buy a $30 webcam if they don't already have laptops. I wouldn't worry about the headset, either - cell phone headsets or earpods generally work fine and most everyone has a decent one nowadays. Wait for the folks who want something nicer to ask for one. Cheap internet is fine. I worked from home with rock bottom residential service, the cheapest they would give me, and my connectivity was fantastic, better than anything I've ever had from an office. The secret is that nobody's on the Internet from home during the day, so you've got infrastructure that was meant to handle the whole world watching Netflix at 8pm more-or-less to yourself. This is assuming a distributed team. mind. They have a tendency to self-assemble. Partial co-location is where things get messy and you start needing to worry about smart whiteboards and fancy videoconferencing equipment and all that crap. All that's really for is to make it an eensy bit more likely that the co-located folks will be willing to collaborate with the remote folks rather than forming a clique and forgetting that the rest of the team exists.
  - ebiester 11y ago
    By the parent comment, I was assuming a distributed team. Speaking from far-too-much experience, partially colocated teams are a productivity suck. But I really do mean a fully distributed team needs a way to properly sketch things out. One of the biggest weaknesses I've seen is that people get limited by the equipment. So long as that's a separate piece of equipment from your video conferencing, it should be fine.
    - bunderbunder 11y ago
      Yea, with partial co-location you need to budget at least 25% of your person-hours to hostage negotiations and koombeya meetings about people's hurt feelings. 0/10, would not try again.
  - ebiester 11y ago
    By the parent comment, I was assuming a distributed team. Speaking from far-too-much experience, partially colocated teams are a productivity suck. But I really do mean a fully distributed team needs a way to properly sketch things out. One of the biggest weaknesses I've seen is that people get limited by the equipment. So long as that's a separate piece of equipment from your video conferencing, it should be fine.
- warfangle 11y ago
  Funny story... A lot of places have more reliable internet than the bay area.
humbleMouse 11y ago
Funny you mentioned not being able to get a good meal after 9:30pm. That was the most frustrating thing about being in San Francisco for me. I hated that the whole bay seemed to shut down @10pm - almost as if everybody has to wake up the next morning to work another 12 hour day to pay the insane rent.....
- timr 11y ago
  Don't get me started. You get inured to it after a while, but every time I travel outside of SF, I remember what it's like to live in a real city. I moved here because it had a pleasant climate and (once had) a vibrant art/culture scene that provided ~80% of what you could get in bigger cities, at a discount. It was a city, but with a higher quality of life. For that, you might be willing give up some things. That's no longer true. I don't know how new people rationalize the costs here, except as an "investment" into something else -- their career, real estate, whatever.
- metanoia 11y ago
  It's because everyone in SF seems to be a morning person. In my building everyone (except me) is asleep by 10pm. In NYC things are only getting started at 10.
  - largote 11y ago
    Definitely this, it's ridiculous how early stuff closes around here and how early people go out. Moving from Mexico it was a big shock.
    - derefr 11y ago
      This doesn't square with my perception of SV programmers always mentioning staying late to hack on their startup. Do they actually mean that they got there at 6AM, so staying until 5PM is "late?"
      - metanoia 11y ago
        I don't think that it's all hackers. Without mentioning the neighborhood (because this borders on stereotype, and these things usually devolve into an x vs. x neighborhood discussion), I live in a neighborhood where people mostly hold non-technical titles like "marketing manager" and "product manager". And they've all worked out, shopped for groceries, had breakfast, etc. before 9am.
jimminy 11y ago
The fact that everything closed so early blew me away, when I moved there. Compared to the middle of nowhere WV it made zero sense. Even the grocery stores closed by midnight in SF. In WV, you can find food at most places until 12-1am 7 days a week. And the major local grocery is a Walmart, which is open 24 hours. Last Easter I had no clue nothing would be open, and didn't prepare for that. So I just had some crap picked up at a gas station to hold me over until the next day. It's a really bizarre situation compared to most other metros, but even compared to a bunch of small towns.
- armenarmen 11y ago
  This is one of the strangest things about the Bay for sure. It is like a stereotype of a sleepy little town this way. I stay in Oakland now, and there is one cafe (within bike riding distance for me) that is open to midnight.
- cubano 11y ago
  I still to this day argue that by a significant margin, the best thing about living in Vegas was the everything goes 24-hour lifestyle where you can literally do or eat anything you want 24/365.
  - rconti 11y ago
    I wouldn't argue against that being the best thing Vegas has going for it.
    - Falcon9 11y ago
      Cheap housing, cheap decent food options, access to all-you-can-eat-entertainment, relative proximity to SoCal/beach all factor in as well. But the Summer is miserable (IMO) and the people here just don't give a crap about life, so it can be pretty draining to live in Vegas as well.
      - cubano 11y ago
        >...and the people here just don't give a crap about life Yes and to finish my OP thought, I would argue that this was without a doubt the worse of it as well.
nunez 11y ago
> I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros where you can't get a good meal after 9:30. This one took me by surprise when I visited SF for the first time five years ago. I thought it would be booming with activity just like NYC, so I thought nothing of trying to find food when I arrived at ~11pm. NOTHING. Nothing was open. It must be a huge bummer to live in a city with NYC prices without that (very important --- to me) NYC perk.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nugget 11y ago
  Aren't most major problems also major opportunities? Has nobody started a great 24/7 food delivery service bringing overpriced food to tech workers on demand?
- ghaff 11y ago
  NYC is really the outlier. Not that I'm typically out eating late in the city but what you describe isn't all that different in Boston/Cambridge (and Cambridge bars closed at midnight until relatively recently). And, last time I got into downtown Chicago late (11pm or so) on a business trip, the only food available near the hotel was takeout delivery from some pizza place.
- scurvy 11y ago
  That's a major over exaggeration and you know it. Name any neighborhood in the city, and I'll give you at least one place open until midnight. You probably couldn't see anything open from your hotel in Union Square or SOMA, but it's there. Just open foursquare or Yelp.
  - timr 11y ago
    I worked at Yelp, and I've lived here for nearly a decade, and I'm here to tell you: there are maybe ten decent restaurants open in all of SF at midnight. On a good day. You're screwed on a Monday night. Even if we lower the standard to include fast food and/or greasy post-drunk food, the number jumps to perhaps 30, on a weekend night. So there might be a late-night restaurant in every neighborhood, but there's definitely no more than one. If you want something good, you need to eat before 9.
chrischen 11y ago
Completely agree with you. The whole point of software and the internet is to destroy boundaries and borders, especially physical ones. Companies neither have to have physical offices nor do they have to be located in the Bay Area. And unfortunately culture dictates that an office is always necessary and that you need to locate your tech company in the Bay Area for dubious reasons like fundraising (which should only take a small portion of the operation of your company anyways), hiring (good engineers might come here if they agree with the lifestyle, and the job opportunities, but that doesn't mean jobs should come here because good engineers are here), or synergy (the belief that the physical proximity to other tech firms may help your company. Only applicable to certain markets at best).
- bogomipz 11y ago
  Ha, yeah this makes me laugh. Startups that run completely on virtual machines in the cloud and their mission is to disrupt industry X but all of this can only be done from an open plan office space in SOMA.
  - cylinder 11y ago
    Oh the irony of Slack opening up a bunch of offices around the world.
  - eip 11y ago
    Beautiful SOMA.. where your ultra expensive, tiny office comes complete with a group of crack heads sleeping in tents in front of your office doors. If you need some light pre-lunch entertainment watch them drunkenly shout profanities at each other, at you, or sometimes at the sky. Even the crack heads in SF are high class though. Where else do you see homeless people sleeping in $250 REI tents?
stouset 11y ago
> Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence. Sorry, but this is flawed logic. Tech, more than seemingly any other industry I can think of, has a winner-takes-all model of success. Given this, starting a tech company anywhere other than where the overwhelming majority of the most capable employees live is virtually suicide. And this seems to pan out in the data as well — Twitter, Square, Uber, Google, Facebook, Reddit, AirBnB, Apple, Oracle, Box, Palantir, Pinterest, Lyft, Stripe, CloudFlare… not that these are all of tech, but finding even a fraction of these anywhere (other than perhaps New York) is a stretch. Given that, it's patently worth it to pay the extra cost per employee, when the relative value of each employee to the company ends up being so high compared to other industries. This is not to say you can't build a strong tech company in other parts of the US, but you're stacking the odds against you by doing so.
- kyllo 11y ago
  You missed the point, parent commenter is saying that communication technology should enable you to build a successful tech company with a geographically distributed team.
  - stouset 11y ago
    Parent commenter claimed that "the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence". I argued against that, and in my opinion the available data appears to back me up on this. Communication technology hasn't so far enabled, at least in the general case, geographically-distributed tech companies – otherwise we would be seeing an increasing trend of successful tech companies headquartered elsewhere. I don't think we are. Put another way, whatever advantage is conferred upon SF by physically housing an outsized share of tech workers is clearly giving it a competitive advantage that other locations have yet to overcome.
    - kyllo 11y ago
      Yeah, my personal theory on this is that the short to medium term success of tech startups is mostly based on factors and advantages other than product quality and technical excellence. Having a distributed tech team is not hard, but most startups aren't distributed because the VCs aren't distributed. They want face to face meetings.
nandemo 11y ago
>or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere If people really figure out how to consistently develop any kind of software remotely, with any team size and with average programmers, a lot of programming jobs will move away from high living cost areas, as happened with manufacturing jobs. If you're in the US, where software developer salaries are much higher than most of the rest of the world (even on developed countries average programmers don't earn 6 figures), you'll be probably be on the losing side.
BurningFrog 11y ago
...or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere. This is a false alternative, since it's not something SF government can do.

by timr 11y ago

ebiester 11y ago

I've thought about that, but as far as I can tell, it means about $10-$15k of equipment and a dedicated work room. I need a mobile-connected "smart" whiteboard for every team member, a good microphone, webcam, speakers, a separate computer + monitor devoted to video conferencing, and a team that is geographically dispersed rather than partially-colocated. ...and hopefully, everyone has first class redundant internet, something not guaranteed across the nation.

timr 11y ago
I'm not suggesting that you have to have a distributed team -- though, you certainly can, and $10-$15k is trivial compared to the economic penalty of hiring good engineers in SF. I'm just saying: consider locating your company somewhere else. There are great engineers all over the world, and most of your customers are not here.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  They aren't in the valley for customer nor for techies, but for easy vc money access brought by locally connections. For now.
  - timr 11y ago
    Well, that's an aspect of it. But there's a heaping helping of cargo-cult superstition, too. For example, ask an entrepreneur to consider locating their office in Oakland: it's becoming more "acceptable" now that Uber has committed to a huge space over there, but a year or two ago, I had people telling me that locating in Oakland was the equivalent of wanting your company to die. For being a 20-minute BART ride from downtown SF. People have lost their minds. Also, of course, few around here believe that there are good programmers outside of the city. Mostly, though, I think it's about 20-somethings who want to feel like they've made it because they're running a startup in the most expensive city in the country. The cult is powerful, for such a group of disruptive, innovative thinkers.
im_down_w_otp 11y ago
The difference in competitive salary for me between SF and PDX (where I live) is ~$70k. Which you have to pay yearly, not as a one-time discounted cost. In fact even down at the very, very low-end of tech-related jobs (~$50k in PDX) the difference between SF and PDX is ~$18k. There is literally no shape of tech-oriented business you could operate where having to spend only $15k per employee when they're onboarded isn't a net financial benefit compared to having to pay SF-area competitive salaries for the same positions.
ksenzee 11y ago
The only hard requirements are a good headset and decent Internet. And when I say "decent," I don't mean "fabulous." I worked remote for five years, three time zones away from headquarters, and never even thought of getting a mobile-connected smart whiteboard. It might have been nifty, but it's by no means a requirement. The main requirement is that everyone communicate over the same channels. No planning sessions at the watercooler. Take it back to your desk and have the conversation in Slack instead.
bunderbunder 11y ago
I hope that by "mobile-connected smart whiteboard for every team member" you mean "laptop or tablet with touchscreen, and a stylus". You shouldn't need most of the rest of that, either. Make sure everyone has a 2nd monitor, and you'll need to buy a $30 webcam if they don't already have laptops. I wouldn't worry about the headset, either - cell phone headsets or earpods generally work fine and most everyone has a decent one nowadays. Wait for the folks who want something nicer to ask for one. Cheap internet is fine. I worked from home with rock bottom residential service, the cheapest they would give me, and my connectivity was fantastic, better than anything I've ever had from an office. The secret is that nobody's on the Internet from home during the day, so you've got infrastructure that was meant to handle the whole world watching Netflix at 8pm more-or-less to yourself. This is assuming a distributed team. mind. They have a tendency to self-assemble. Partial co-location is where things get messy and you start needing to worry about smart whiteboards and fancy videoconferencing equipment and all that crap. All that's really for is to make it an eensy bit more likely that the co-located folks will be willing to collaborate with the remote folks rather than forming a clique and forgetting that the rest of the team exists.
- ebiester 11y ago
  By the parent comment, I was assuming a distributed team. Speaking from far-too-much experience, partially colocated teams are a productivity suck. But I really do mean a fully distributed team needs a way to properly sketch things out. One of the biggest weaknesses I've seen is that people get limited by the equipment. So long as that's a separate piece of equipment from your video conferencing, it should be fine.
  - bunderbunder 11y ago
    Yea, with partial co-location you need to budget at least 25% of your person-hours to hostage negotiations and koombeya meetings about people's hurt feelings. 0/10, would not try again.
- ebiester 11y ago
  By the parent comment, I was assuming a distributed team. Speaking from far-too-much experience, partially colocated teams are a productivity suck. But I really do mean a fully distributed team needs a way to properly sketch things out. One of the biggest weaknesses I've seen is that people get limited by the equipment. So long as that's a separate piece of equipment from your video conferencing, it should be fine.
warfangle 11y ago
Funny story... A lot of places have more reliable internet than the bay area.

humbleMouse 11y ago

Funny you mentioned not being able to get a good meal after 9:30pm. That was the most frustrating thing about being in San Francisco for me. I hated that the whole bay seemed to shut down @10pm - almost as if everybody has to wake up the next morning to work another 12 hour day to pay the insane rent.....

timr 11y ago
Don't get me started. You get inured to it after a while, but every time I travel outside of SF, I remember what it's like to live in a real city. I moved here because it had a pleasant climate and (once had) a vibrant art/culture scene that provided ~80% of what you could get in bigger cities, at a discount. It was a city, but with a higher quality of life. For that, you might be willing give up some things. That's no longer true. I don't know how new people rationalize the costs here, except as an "investment" into something else -- their career, real estate, whatever.
metanoia 11y ago
It's because everyone in SF seems to be a morning person. In my building everyone (except me) is asleep by 10pm. In NYC things are only getting started at 10.
- largote 11y ago
  Definitely this, it's ridiculous how early stuff closes around here and how early people go out. Moving from Mexico it was a big shock.
  - derefr 11y ago
    This doesn't square with my perception of SV programmers always mentioning staying late to hack on their startup. Do they actually mean that they got there at 6AM, so staying until 5PM is "late?"
    - metanoia 11y ago
      I don't think that it's all hackers. Without mentioning the neighborhood (because this borders on stereotype, and these things usually devolve into an x vs. x neighborhood discussion), I live in a neighborhood where people mostly hold non-technical titles like "marketing manager" and "product manager". And they've all worked out, shopped for groceries, had breakfast, etc. before 9am.

jimminy 11y ago

The fact that everything closed so early blew me away, when I moved there. Compared to the middle of nowhere WV it made zero sense. Even the grocery stores closed by midnight in SF. In WV, you can find food at most places until 12-1am 7 days a week. And the major local grocery is a Walmart, which is open 24 hours. Last Easter I had no clue nothing would be open, and didn't prepare for that. So I just had some crap picked up at a gas station to hold me over until the next day. It's a really bizarre situation compared to most other metros, but even compared to a bunch of small towns.

armenarmen 11y ago
This is one of the strangest things about the Bay for sure. It is like a stereotype of a sleepy little town this way. I stay in Oakland now, and there is one cafe (within bike riding distance for me) that is open to midnight.
cubano 11y ago
I still to this day argue that by a significant margin, the best thing about living in Vegas was the everything goes 24-hour lifestyle where you can literally do or eat anything you want 24/365.
- rconti 11y ago
  I wouldn't argue against that being the best thing Vegas has going for it.
  - Falcon9 11y ago
    Cheap housing, cheap decent food options, access to all-you-can-eat-entertainment, relative proximity to SoCal/beach all factor in as well. But the Summer is miserable (IMO) and the people here just don't give a crap about life, so it can be pretty draining to live in Vegas as well.
    - cubano 11y ago
      >...and the people here just don't give a crap about life Yes and to finish my OP thought, I would argue that this was without a doubt the worse of it as well.

nunez 11y ago

> I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros where you can't get a good meal after 9:30. This one took me by surprise when I visited SF for the first time five years ago. I thought it would be booming with activity just like NYC, so I thought nothing of trying to find food when I arrived at ~11pm. NOTHING. Nothing was open. It must be a huge bummer to live in a city with NYC prices without that (very important --- to me) NYC perk.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nugget 11y ago
Aren't most major problems also major opportunities? Has nobody started a great 24/7 food delivery service bringing overpriced food to tech workers on demand?
ghaff 11y ago
NYC is really the outlier. Not that I'm typically out eating late in the city but what you describe isn't all that different in Boston/Cambridge (and Cambridge bars closed at midnight until relatively recently). And, last time I got into downtown Chicago late (11pm or so) on a business trip, the only food available near the hotel was takeout delivery from some pizza place.
scurvy 11y ago
That's a major over exaggeration and you know it. Name any neighborhood in the city, and I'll give you at least one place open until midnight. You probably couldn't see anything open from your hotel in Union Square or SOMA, but it's there. Just open foursquare or Yelp.
- timr 11y ago
  I worked at Yelp, and I've lived here for nearly a decade, and I'm here to tell you: there are maybe ten decent restaurants open in all of SF at midnight. On a good day. You're screwed on a Monday night. Even if we lower the standard to include fast food and/or greasy post-drunk food, the number jumps to perhaps 30, on a weekend night. So there might be a late-night restaurant in every neighborhood, but there's definitely no more than one. If you want something good, you need to eat before 9.

chrischen 11y ago

Completely agree with you. The whole point of software and the internet is to destroy boundaries and borders, especially physical ones. Companies neither have to have physical offices nor do they have to be located in the Bay Area. And unfortunately culture dictates that an office is always necessary and that you need to locate your tech company in the Bay Area for dubious reasons like fundraising (which should only take a small portion of the operation of your company anyways), hiring (good engineers might come here if they agree with the lifestyle, and the job opportunities, but that doesn't mean jobs should come here because good engineers are here), or synergy (the belief that the physical proximity to other tech firms may help your company. Only applicable to certain markets at best).

bogomipz 11y ago
Ha, yeah this makes me laugh. Startups that run completely on virtual machines in the cloud and their mission is to disrupt industry X but all of this can only be done from an open plan office space in SOMA.
- cylinder 11y ago
  Oh the irony of Slack opening up a bunch of offices around the world.
- eip 11y ago
  Beautiful SOMA.. where your ultra expensive, tiny office comes complete with a group of crack heads sleeping in tents in front of your office doors. If you need some light pre-lunch entertainment watch them drunkenly shout profanities at each other, at you, or sometimes at the sky. Even the crack heads in SF are high class though. Where else do you see homeless people sleeping in $250 REI tents?

stouset 11y ago

> Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence. Sorry, but this is flawed logic. Tech, more than seemingly any other industry I can think of, has a winner-takes-all model of success. Given this, starting a tech company anywhere other than where the overwhelming majority of the most capable employees live is virtually suicide. And this seems to pan out in the data as well — Twitter, Square, Uber, Google, Facebook, Reddit, AirBnB, Apple, Oracle, Box, Palantir, Pinterest, Lyft, Stripe, CloudFlare… not that these are all of tech, but finding even a fraction of these anywhere (other than perhaps New York) is a stretch. Given that, it's patently worth it to pay the extra cost per employee, when the relative value of each employee to the company ends up being so high compared to other industries. This is not to say you can't build a strong tech company in other parts of the US, but you're stacking the odds against you by doing so.

kyllo 11y ago
You missed the point, parent commenter is saying that communication technology should enable you to build a successful tech company with a geographically distributed team.
- stouset 11y ago
  Parent commenter claimed that "the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence". I argued against that, and in my opinion the available data appears to back me up on this. Communication technology hasn't so far enabled, at least in the general case, geographically-distributed tech companies – otherwise we would be seeing an increasing trend of successful tech companies headquartered elsewhere. I don't think we are. Put another way, whatever advantage is conferred upon SF by physically housing an outsized share of tech workers is clearly giving it a competitive advantage that other locations have yet to overcome.
  - kyllo 11y ago
    Yeah, my personal theory on this is that the short to medium term success of tech startups is mostly based on factors and advantages other than product quality and technical excellence. Having a distributed tech team is not hard, but most startups aren't distributed because the VCs aren't distributed. They want face to face meetings.

nandemo 11y ago

>or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere If people really figure out how to consistently develop any kind of software remotely, with any team size and with average programmers, a lot of programming jobs will move away from high living cost areas, as happened with manufacturing jobs. If you're in the US, where software developer salaries are much higher than most of the rest of the world (even on developed countries average programmers don't earn 6 figures), you'll be probably be on the losing side.

BurningFrog 11y ago

...or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere. This is a false alternative, since it's not something SF government can do.