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Silicon Valley job seekers are increasingly looking for work elsewhere
- Apocryphon 10y agoHaving visited Austin, I almost feel like a huge amount of the population is made of transplants, whether tech or not. Plenty of UT students, as well. That could explain lack of outbound searches, since many of the techies only recently moved to there.
- donretag 10y agoThat is true of almost anywhere. In the US, overseas, big cities, small cities. At least in the US, the current migration pattern is back toward cities, after the move to the suburbs of the past couple of generations.
- lucidguppy 10y agohttps://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/why-is-everyone-leaving-the-city/521844/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/why-is-...
- Spooky23 10y agoThat's 100% nonsense. Some urban cores are seeing gentrification. Inner suburbs are going ghetto, and people with kids are moving further out. Until you start hearing about urban schools doing great, anything you hear about the resurgence of the city is due to your personal overexposure to dink couples and gay people without families.
- shados 10y agoDefinitely don't hear about urban schools doing great. What I do hear is pretty much everyone I know (and who can afford it, which in tech isn't a small amount) moving closer to the city and sending their kids to expensive private schools (which in turn, probably makes the problem worse).
- geebee 10y agoCheck this out. http://www.greatschools.org/california/san-francisco/ http://www.greatschools.org/california/san-francisco/ SFUSD has a large number of very high performing public schools, though there are also still a lot of middling and severely underperforming schools. Test scores aren't everything, but I don't think it's accurate to say SF has bad schools. I'd say it's more of a a mixed bag. That's the case for the suburbs as well, the difference is that you can convert a high mortgage payment into priority access to a 9 or 10 in the burbs, whereas in SF, there's a much greater element of randomness to it.
- DiNovi 10y agothis is extremely wrong. I watched the city I grew up rapidly gentrify, and I have seen my new city(nyc) rapidly gentrify over the past decade. I think your opinion is due to personal underexposure and perhaps some bias toward urban lifestyles.
- Spooky23 10y agoActually, I live in the middle of my city. I grew up in NYC and a rural town and settled in a mid sized city. The pattern is pretty clear, people stick around until kindergarten or middle school. At that point, 50% leave, 25% catholic school, 25% stick around.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rdl 10y agoI'm still a big fan of "work in Silicon Valley for 1-4 years, once", but there isn't a day I wake up in the Seattle area not happy to have moved.
- ivraatiems 10y agoI interviewed out in San Francisco right out of college, and was struck by how strongly I did not want to move there. The primary drivers were cost - unsurprising - but also attitude. I don't buy into a lot of the SV culture, I don't find it encouraging, and I wasn't really willing to tolerate it just to work for a slightly cooler or higher-paying company than the ones I could find in the Midwest. I guess I can't blame SV for that - I am just clearly not a fit for it - but I can't help but wonder whether there are people out there now who are more like me than they realize, and might be happier elsewehere (or would go elsewhere if they reasonably thought they could).
- econner 10y agoWhat elements of the attitude did you dislike?
- crikli 10y agoI can't speak for the OP but his perspective is quite similar to my own and I can offer my thoughts on the SV attitude. I felt it to be a strong culture of comparison. Comparing job position, comparing employer, comparing income by implication. Ugh. Just not my ethos. I lived my 20s in that mindset and it's a zero sum game. I also felt like it was so damn expensive to live there that even people making great salaries were constantly under pressure. To me, a pretty relaxed Midwesterner, it just seems like everyone is on edge. The other thing that grated on me was the "funding equals success" mentality. So you got funded. Big. Effing. Deal. Go turn a profit. It just isn't my kind of vibe. Like I said I'm a Midwesterner, the culture I grew up in is one of frugal living and understated successes.
- BrainInAJar 10y agoThere's also this whole vibe of everyone needs to make a statement and change the world. It's what the hippies do (with license plates that say "BIODIESEL" on their truck, etc), and it's what the SV tech bros do ("we're changing the world with our illegal taxi app")
- 10y ago
- horsecaptin 10y agoSome reasons why you may want to move out of San Francisco: - You want to live around real people and not around people who talk to computers all day, while making up stories about real people in their mind. - You don't think that waiting for an hour to get into a restaurant is a good way to spend your one hour off work. - You want a yard. - You're tired of people constantly being offended by everything. - You like commitment and people who can make up their mind.
- MegaButts 10y ago- You're tired of people constantly being offended by everything. - You like commitment and people who can make up their mind. I hear these a lot, but this hasn't been my experience at all. The people I meet are rarely offended and don't flake out on me.
- s73ver 10y agoGenerally the people who are upset about "people constantly being offended by everything" are the ones saying the really offensive stuff.
- maerF0x0 10y agoAnecdata: I've noticed both of these pervasively across circles of people I've met. My guess is that for 1) There is a strong group think culture here that expects everyone to conform to their definition of "normal" and if you dont, then you'll get shamed and 2) Most people dont notice how flakey/late they are because most people are flakey and late and just assume they're "normal". But for those of us who are comitted and on time, its mind boggling and drives one mad.
- MegaButts 9y agoRegarding 1, I guess that is true about politics. Regarding 2, I just don't see it except for a few asshat VC's I've only dealt with once (after the first meeting I had no interest in working with them).
- 10y ago
- Apocryphon 10y agoAlso, has anyone noticed that the HN "Who is hiring?" threads are predominantly from outside of SV, these days?
- TheAdamAndChe 10y agoThey're still mostly in tech hubs, though. Just that they are leaving SV doesn't mean the wealth concentration problems we're seeing are going to reverse itself. Those cities will likely have the same or similar problems SV did.
- mylons 10y agoi just looked yesterday at the whoishiring thread and SF still had the most jobs for any particular city. do you have any hard data to back up your claim?
- Apocryphon 10y agoNo, it just seemed to be that there used to be more SF companies in threads I saw from months or a year ago.
- dmode 10y agoIt's still dominated by SV, which is surprising given the number of European startups that post. I think NYC and London are #2 and #3 on the list.
- 11thEarlOfMar 10y agoCouldn't dig up more recent data[0], but tech job growth in absolute numbers, from 2014 -> 2015: San Francisco: +21% 59,600 -> 72,200 Silicon Valley: +7.2% 229,200 -> 245,800 Oakland/East-Bay: +11.8% 50,600 ->56,600 SF Mid-Peninsula: +5.0% 45,600 -> 47,900 Boston: +3.1% 149,700 -> 156,000 Austin: +7.8% 74,400 -> 80,200 [0] page 4: http://www.us.jll.com/united-states/en-us/Research/US-Tech-Employment-Trends-2016-JLL.pdf http://www.us.jll.com/united-states/en-us/Research/US-Tech-E... Edit: Added Mid-Peninsula and East Bay to complete SF Bay Area. Total Bay Area Tech Jobs in 2015: 444,500 Edit 2: Corrected typo, as pointed out, my bad. SF 72,200
- kyleschiller 10y agoThanks for the hard data. I'm a bit confused because the study counts SF, Silicon Valley and SF Mid-Peninsula without defining them well, and there's no mention of South Bay at all, unless that's what they're referring to as SV. EDIT: It doesn't seem like SV is being used as an aggregate term, since there's more absolute growth happening in SF and SF Mid-Peninsula than in SV. EDIT2: Unless I'm terrible at reading charts and tables, it looks a lot like San Francisco hit 72,205 in 2015, not 76,200.
- 11thEarlOfMar 10y agoTypo on my part, thanks for pointing it out, corrected.
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoWow. So Boston only had 7% of the tech job-growth in 2015. That explains a lot.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoIf I understand correctly, you misread that. (Alternately, I misread it.) I think it said that Boston had 7% year-on-year growth of tech jobs, not that Boston had 7% of the country's tech job growth.
- BadassFractal 10y agoHard to ask someone to sell their house, move their employed spouse and children to the most expensive patch of land in the country and also hire-fast-fire-fast. Seems like moving to the Bay optimizes for people with no relationships or dependents, generally keeping the age range pretty low. Not saying it should change, SV can't be everything for everybody, but that's the current state.
- Apocryphon 10y agoSV might fire fast, but it doesn't seem to hire fast.
- sulam 10y agoThis should be retitled "Silicon Valley job seekers are increasingly willing to consider working elsewhere." There is no data in this post about where people actually end up working. Given job growth in the major tech hubs, it is implausible and/or mathematically unlikely that SF is no longer as attractive to job seekers as places like Austin. Nothing against Austin, but the tech industry there is still an order of magnitude smaller than SF, and the gap is not shrinking.
- calvinbhai 10y agoCould this also be because a huge %age of these job seekers are high skilled immigrants and they are unable to secure work visas in time?
- esturk 10y agoI'm actually looking forward to the day when the outflux of workers balances out the influx. As it is right now, influx > outflux, so the population in SV is still growing which actually contributes to the housing crisis. Because the difference, or the growth of population is greater than the growth of housing. Influx - Outflux > Housing Growth. Once outflux > influx, we might actually see some sanity to housing prices.
- JimboOmega 10y agoOr, you know, we could build housing... maybe at a rate comparable to the rate we build office space?
- rattray 10y agoPerhaps worth noting that Indeed is based in Austin and may have a bias.
- rattray 10y agoThere may be a skew in the data on the pure basis of "who's using Indeed for their job hunt". For example – it's not a popular job-search platform amongst SF startups, as far as I'm aware. (I personally still buy the overall conclusion, fwiw).
- jacques_chester 10y agoWhat I tell folk about NYC is that unlike SF, we techies can't be blamed for ruining the city. Finance folk got in first and have ruined New York about a dozen times at this point. There's relatively little left to ruin.
- JimboOmega 10y agoHow does one measure the ruination of a city? Or know if it is ruined?
- bunderbunder 10y agoThis seems semi-related: http://journal.burningman.org/2016/10/philosophical-center/tenprinciples/a-brief-history-of-who-ruined-burning-man/ http://journal.burningman.org/2016/10/philosophical-center/t...
- dmode 10y agoI don't know anyone in the Bay Area that uses Indeed for Job Search. So this survey may be a little skewed
- ap3 10y agoWhat do you/they use?
- dmode 10y agoLinkedIn, Glassdoor, AngelList, HN, referrals, recruiters, Hired etc
- dmode 10y agoAlso, companies like Google, Apple, Facebook have thousands of job openings which mostly can be found only in their career pages
- JimboOmega 10y agoYeah. I honestly just reply to some of the recruiters that are flooding my inbox (that's how I got my current job); if I'm feeling ambitious I poke around AngelList, and ask friends if their companies are hiring. Indeed seems as old and busted as Monster.com or... what was that one? Cube? Dice? Something like that.
- tryitnow 10y agoWhat's really interesting is comparing the outbound job search percentages of various cities. I'm surprised SF/SJ were at 44% versus only 2% for NYC and Seattle. I have no idea how real estate can maintain its value, clearly a lot of people are considering moving. BTW, The data in this article could have been presented a lot more effectively.
- jeffbush 10y agoThis reminds me of the old Yogi Berra quip "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
- maerF0x0 10y agoIve noticed since moving to SF that it seems that complaining about the city is one of the city's favorite pastimes.