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I left my home country to work in the bay area largely because I was going to a well established company in an area dense with other work. The chance of me movi
by twiceaday 9y ago
I left my home country to work in the bay area largely because I was going to a well established company in an area dense with other work. The chance of me moving to the middle of nowhere for a startup is exactly zero.
- ryandrake 9y agoYes, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. If there were plenty of good tech job opportunities in Nowheresville, USA, tech people would move there. If there were more tech people in Nowheresville, USA, companies would move there. Who has to act first to bootstrap the next tech hub?
- thrden 9y agoSame one that bootstrapped Silicon Valley. The government.
- mathperson 9y agoIndirectly!
- sid-kap 9y agoGoogle, Facebook, and Amazon? Many of my friends believe that Google's new Austin office might lead to other tech companies to move here, but that's just speculation.
- sremani 9y agoYawn, It will be a cold day in hell, when Austin has more tech jobs than Dallas or Houston.
- RhodesianHunter 9y agoBut then you have to live in Dallas or Houston.
- notadoc 9y agoHave you been to either? Texas is quite nice, and has great weather. Cost of living is a small fraction compared to the bay area or west coast cities too.
- RhodesianHunter 9y agoYes, I live in Austin. It's quite nice comparatively. :)
- Arizhel 9y ago>Texas is quite nice, and has great weather. No, it doesn't. It's hot. And the people are conservative; nothing nice about that.
- RhodesianHunter 9y agoYou mean like IBM, Intel, Oracle, Dell, Facebook, Apple, Dell, VMWare, Rackspace, PayPal, Indeed, etc. etc.?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- maxerickson 9y agoThe Cleveland metro area is ~2 million people. Granted it is going to have less tech jobs, but it isn't really the middle of nowhere.
- Arizhel 9y agoIt IS the middle of nowhere when you're talking about tech jobs. How many people live in the city is irrelevant if they don't have jobs for you there.
- sremani 9y agoI once made a comfortable living as a Software Engineer in Cleveland metro, they do have Progressive insurance, bunch of banks like National City, Key Bank (which may have now been acquired). The comments coming out people who very likely are Bay Area residents are the most ignorant as well as close-minded. Unless you are killing it in R&D departments of Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft etc. There is some one doing a similar job you are doing in 10 other metros in 'Murica.
- Arizhel 9y agoMaybe, maybe not. It depends on your specialty. I do embedded programming, and there's a bunch of metro areas where there just isn't much work for me; NYC is one of these. There's tons of software work there, but it's all finance or web, and very very little embedded. But there's other places, which are not traditional tech hubs, where there is some work for me where I'd rather not work, such as Detroit.
- unprepare 9y agoWhat specifically about Detroit makes you not want to live there? disclaimer: detroit resident
- Arizhel 9y agoBrutal winters and high crime rate, what else? Of course, there's lots of other problems like decrepit infrastructure (like the water pipes in Flint nearby), and I seriously doubt there's any kind of nice downtown area to walk around in like in nicer cities. I hear the suburbs are OK, but that doesn't exactly make me want to live someplace. Basically, AFAICT, Detroit sounds like someplace that would be OK if all you wanted was to live in the suburbs and never leave your house, and you have zero interest in outdoor activities, and don't care about going to nice restaurants downtown. The crime downtown is terrible, there's huge stretches of abandoned neighborhoods, the winters are horribly cold; I honestly don't know why anyone would want to live there. The location surely made sense a century ago back when shipping on the Great Lakes was a big thing and the location was sensible for manufacturing and shipping reasons, but those reasons are all gone now.
- dba7dba 9y agoTrue. But for some American born engineer who has family outside of SF/NY/LA, being able to work remote while staying near family/hometown would be awesome for himself, the hometown and ultimately residents of those mega cities too as they would see some relief in ever increasing cost of living. Google/Facebook/etc have to pay a lot higher salary to keep talented engineers in/near SF because of much higher cost of living. Those employers probably COULD save $ if they paid lower salary and allowed full remote working. Even if they flew in the engineers on chartered jet every other week and housed them in hotel for regular face-2-face time in HQ, they still probably would end up saving $ in the end. Like instead of paying salary of half a million a year, they could pay $300,000 and use the $200,000 for chartered jets and housing when they are visiting SF.
- tsunamifury 9y agoThe vast majority of people in SV don't make 500k. 200-300 puts you in the upper middle even in tech.