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why everyone needs to be in Bay Area to work productively Could this have to do with the state of the safety net in the country? If you lost your tech job in
by HarryHirsch 10y ago
why everyone needs to be in Bay Area to work productively
Could this have to do with the state of the safety net in the country? If you lost your tech job in 2007 and lived in Austin or Dallas you could look at nine months or a year of unemployment. In SF you'd be looking at three to six months until the new job. The attraction of SF isn't the quality of jobs, it's the concentration, the phenomenon is jobseeker-driven. And if you are a landlord you profit handsomely.
- mattkrause 10y agoThe same dynamic affects couples. Both partners need jobs that are no more than two reasonable commutes apart. If you both do something fairly specialized, a lot of smaller places just aren't viable. My SO and I both have fairly technical jobs. We occasionally talk about moving, but there is a surprisingly short list of cities where we are confident that we could both work. I find interesting jobs in out-of-the-way places (GE has some medical imaging stuff in Schenectady, for example), but without some incredible luck, it would tough-verging-on-impossible for us to make somewhere like that work. In the US, universities (which are often in the middle of nowhere), sometimes try to compensate by hiring both partners. Power couples where either individual would be a catch in their own right have it easiest, but hotshots can sometimes land their solid-but-not-meteoric spouse a tenure-track job. I've even seen a few spouses hired into non-academic jobs in the university's accounting or legal departments. Do any companies do something similar? It seems like it would be a huge boon to recruiting, especially outside of huge cities.