8 ms·

Serious question ... can anyone explain to me why tech needs to be squeezed together in these hyper-expensive cities in the US? I don't buy the argument about

Serious question ... can anyone explain to me why tech needs to be squeezed together in these hyper-expensive cities in the US? I don't buy the argument about needing to be close to others ... we are in a connected, high-speed world where anyone can have a "face to face" with anyone else at a moment's notice. I have been a software engineer for 25+ years and have avoided SV/SA like the plague due to what is mentioned in this article. When I need to visit a company in SF or NYC, I get on a plane. Remote work gets the job done, and if you are making US software engineer salary but choose to live in a low-cost-of-living area, you are essentially rich. You can buy as many dishwashers as you want.

untog 8y ago
Tech is squeezed into hyper-expensive cities because, as illogical as it may seem, it's where a lot of workers want to live. As an industry, tech skews young. And a lot of young people want to live in urban environments full of culture and entertainment, and have a job that has a social dimension to it. Now that I'm older (thirties, married, kids) remote work from somewhere other than NYC seems appealing. But it didn't a few years ago.
- realbarack 8y ago
  That's true to a point. Still doesn't explain Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino etc.
  - readhn 8y ago
    just an endless pursuit of materialism. you want something so you gravitate towards it. hence a lot of regular people are destroying their financial futures by staying in these super expensive areas.
    - askafriend 8y ago
      Destroying their financial future? None of my friends living in SF or NYC make less than $160k a year working as engineers. In fact, they make that nearly right out of college. The more senior engineers (5+ yrs exp) bring in $300k-500k a year. They save a significant amount of it, more than they would have saved in any other place. And they can leave at anytime to a low-COL place and buy a house in cash.
      - readhn 8y ago
        people earning 300-500K are very wealthy by any standard. these are not regular people im talking about. 160K salary in SF is probably equivalent to 75K in the middle of America? (considering food, rent/car/health expenses)
  - wallflower 8y ago
    Those cities are in the heart of Silicon Valley. They have been good places for engineers to raise families for several generations since their companies were headquartered nearby. The migration of tech headquarters to SF is relatively new.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      In these discussions, I think a lot of people forget (or don't know) that most of these cities with rapidly increasing rents were losing population just 20 years ago and certainly 30 years ago. It's easy to be critical of infrastructure investment and zoning policies in some places but a lot of the demand is quite recent on the time scale that cities develop.
- reno9111 8y ago
  This is so silly. Denver, Austin, San Diego, Atlanta etc. are fine cities with vibrant urban cores full of culture and entertainment yet none of them require you to pay 3000$/mo for a decent apartment or pay millions to buy a low tier home. There is a mass delusion that SF/SV and NYC residents seem to have that it is impossible to match their lifestyles without paying astronomical numbers for housing and its just absurd.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > There is a mass delusion that SF/SV and NYC residents seem to have that it is impossible to match their lifestyles without paying astronomical numbers for housing and its just absurd. It's not a delusion. Sure, if you find the culture, entertainment, and other lifestyle features of Denver, Austin, San Diego, or Atlanta an acceptable substitute for NYC or SF Bay Area lifestyle, you can get that substitute a bit cheaper. Not everyone does (if they did, Bay Area and NYC prices would drop and those other places would climb.)
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
      The culture and entertainment of the Bay Area is overrated compared to other metros. Everything closes early for some unfathomable reason. I'd say most transplants are there for the tech money. Good food scene, though.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > The culture and entertainment of the Bay Area is overrated compared to other metros. “Overrated” just means other people value it more than you do. But you should be happy, because that presents an opportunity you can exploit by satisfying your preferences more cheaply elsewhere.
        Apocryphon 8y ago
        Certainly. It is mostly the Bay Area native in me who is jaded. Familiarity does breed contempt.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Tech is squeezed into hyper-expensive cities because, as illogical as it may seem, it's where a lot of workers want to live. That's a factor, but I think an even bigger set of factors is: (1) industry-focussed venture capital and related support infrastructure (particularly for startups) prefers proximity, (2) there are benefits to proximity to other firms in the industry other than capital and support structures, e.g., it's easier to pick up experienced workers as you expand if you don't have to get them to relocate, (3) With the money flowing into the industry, wherever it is concentrated is going to become expensive, because the number of dollars chasing housing and other goods is going to be high compared to places it isn't concentrated.
- magduf 8y ago
  It's not just young people. I'm in my forties, but divorced, and no kids, and the last thing I want is a big house in the suburbs. I want to live in a walkable urban environment full of culture, though also within convenient distance of outdoor hiking and cycling trails.
mlrtime 8y ago
Because we would rather live in NYC than Nashville. It's true NYC can be brutal if you don't make enough, but once you get over a certain threshold, there is no other place like it.
- technotony 8y ago
  I'm thinking of moving to NYC from San Francisco, while I bootstrap a new venture. It seems it should be cheaper but still have access to peer networks/potential hires and investors for when the time comes. Do you think that's right? What's the threshold you think you need to earn for it not to be brutal?
  - hijinks 8y ago
    NYC area isn't like SF. You can go 40 minutes outside of SF and it's still expensive. It all depends where you want to live in NYC. Manhattan you'll want to make at least 150k to live alone. If you move outside then you have a lot more options but still be able to commute into the city easily. I lived in Manhattan for 7 years and SF area for 6. I now live outside of Denver and its by far the best move of my life.
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      I hear nothing but complaints from people who have to commute into NYC. If you're not in Manhattan or the nicer parts of Brooklyn, you're easily adding 30 min to your door to door commute, plus the variance is huge due to the ever decreasing quality of the public transit.
  - onemoresoop 8y ago
    min 100k if single but don't expect to save anything
    - e1g 8y ago
      +1. Looking around, most of my NYC peers are 25-35 with no kids, and a typical monthly spend is $6-7k. It's a good life, but not glamorous. Some months are substantially more expensive, almost no months are substantially cheaper.
bitrrrate 8y ago
I’ve been beating this drum for a while. It doesn’t make any logical sense why knowledge/tech workers have to live close to these expensive cities or find affordability by becoming a super commuter from an hour or more away. Sure younger people want to live in those cities but I would think it’d be a good retention policy to allow people to transition to a remote work option. Being able to live in a LCOL area means your tech salary actually counts for something. Not just paying rent on a overpriced apartment.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Personality types. Over the past 25 years since you started, more people with higher social needs have entered the tech workforce and they desire highly dense places to live.
- swiftcoder 8y ago
  That might explain Manhattan and downtown Seattle, but Silicon Valley is... some sort of suburban hell hole that I can't picture any young person being head-over-heals about. I know plenty of folks who commute 2 hours each way from SF to the Valley, just so that they can live in a "real city".
Yhippa 8y ago
People go to where they want to be.
ilikehurdles 8y ago
I want money to be able to live in a nice city where I can walk to things, parks and arts are well funded, where the food is great, and where there are nearby cafes and bars. I could own a large McMansion in the burbs instead of my small brownstone in the city, but I prefer the urban living. I just don’t care about having any more bedrooms, and from my perspective the less yard I have to maintain, the less room I have to clean, the better. On the face-to-face comment: until my local cafe and bar operate a constant zoom meeting and my cycling club sets up rides inside of my home office, I don’t see internet connectivity as a replacement for real contact. I will say this though — there is a big part of me that wants to live in a mountain town in Colorado or Vermont. Convenient nature and having places to walk to — Problem is from my experience the residents are almost entirely people twice my age with a lot of old money. On the topic of Nashville, my buddy moved there from Boston. I honestly thought the city was quite fun (minus the humidity and the neighbors of the Airbnb blasting hellfire evangelical sermons on the radio for their morning lawn-mowing routine), but they’ve come to regret the decision because the running isn’t as good and socially right-wing politics still forces itself upon every space. Political compatibility, even for people who prefer to leave those conversations alone, is important.
- sevensor 8y ago
  Have you considered moving to the town where State U is located? Plentiful access to nature, well-educated community, Pho and independent coffee shops, affordable cost of living. This is the case in many states, since the State U was traditionally sited in a big tract of farmland.
  - ilikehurdles 8y ago
    I lived in Austin and loved it but the heat got to me. I loved the food and nightlife in Nashville when I visited. Also thoroughly enjoyed Burlington VT and would love to live there some day. I wouldn’t mind ending up back in Boston again though. If that’s the kind of places you mean, then yeah. I bought a place in Denver now because it’s so much relatively cheaper than Boston while I’m making the same software engineer wage. I could only afford to buy a teensy tiny old studio or a spot in a garage in Boston for the cost of my centrally-located condo in Denver.
estsauver 8y ago
It's really, really hard to manage people remotely. It might be viable in technology only organizations where most of the product deliverables come in the format of pull requests, but if you're an organization with warehouses, field agents, sales people etc., it can get really hard. I think it's super easy to forget how much we're all just animals trying to do things that are way more complex than we're designed for. We have really great neural pathways for group management in person, from tone of voice, to posture to eye contact and other signalling. Everytime a manager says "Can you get this done sometime soon?" where they mean "sometime this week?" and an employee interprets it as "right now, please stress about this" you burn some political capital. When you're in the same room, it often comes across in tone and nonverbal queues and follow ups are way lower friction.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  It really isn't that hard to manage distributed teams at all. I would say it is easier, because it forces you to be more systematic about how you measure productivity and hold your team accountable to commitments. It makes collaborative work (anything that would involve a whiteboard) a bit harder. However, as a manager, it is very hard to advance to director or higher levels. Having the full day of face time with mid/executive level is a big advantage. And it is hard to hire and introduces some difficult comp/HR challenges. Bringing it back to this topic, I think it makes a lot of sense as an IC or line manager to move to a 2nd or 3rd tier tech community for the quality of life balance.
yesimahuman 8y ago
It doesn't! There are a ton of people doing tech outside of these locales. I agree with you, I have no interest in living in either of those places and I'm building a VC-backed startup not in those places and it's working. Those of us opting out are going to be part of a revolution, and you just have to be okay with the sense that not everyone is going to understand it or have the same vision until it's all proven out. It's just like starting a company in that way (who are the real contrarians again?)
thedufer 8y ago
Remote communication simply isn't as good as in-person. There's a surprisingly large bandwidth communication channel in tone/body language that is easily lost, and quite small audio delays can throw off the rhythm of a conversation. It's no surprise that most of the best paying tech employers avoid remote work.
asdff 8y ago
As an employee, I'd rather work in a place where I can get a relevant job from dozens of different employers, made easier by overlapping networks, versus a city where I could only really work at 1 or 2 places. You can definitely have fun visiting Nashville, but if I moved there I'd quickly run out of new places to discover; nightlife and entertainment are concentrated in a few places and activities.
- barrow-rider 8y ago
  There is more to Nashville than Broadway mon ami.
  - asdff 8y ago
    Where is it? There are areas of NYC and Los Angeles where you will find new cafes/restaurants/bars/clubs/shops on every block. You can set out walking a direction into the unknown and have a pretty decent night, knowing you will run into these attractions in every nook, not just the main drags, and despite living there for years you can discover new places every single day. In Nashville, would I have to uber around to disconnected, well known hotspots? How long until I know of every bar in Nashville that has people in it on a Friday night? I want to be able to constantly discover in my own city, not just when I go on trips out of town.
dmode 8y ago
As someone who lives in the SV suburbs, life is freaking AWESOME. My wife and I both work and we have a small kid. We make a lot of money so that I never have to check my bank account. And we are just mid level managers. We own two houses that have appreciated beyond our wildest dreams. I basically have my retirement savings after working here for only 7 years. Monetary benefits aside: - Both of us work in exciting mega unicorns in growth mode and with amazing benefits and work culture - The weather in SV is awesome year round - We can be outdoors 11 of 12 months - great for my daughter - SV is majority minority - so you can imagine the diversity along with all the food options - We love nature and it is virtually unlimited - SF has the best food scene in the US now (check latest Michelin reports) - I like the tech monoculture - Career choices are unlimited - CA government is very inclusive and responds to voter needs - I like the Ocean and also like Mountains - can be off to Tahoe every weekend in the winters - Amazing small towns in short distances - Napa, Sonoma, Healdsberg, Carmel, Big Sur etc. - Los Angeles is only 6 hrs away - Virtually unlimited things to do for kids - Many more
- objektif 8y ago
  Wow ok good for you.
  - itchyouch 8y ago
    > We own two houses that have appreciated beyond our wildest dreams. Sure it's great for you, but your luck and timing isn't realistically attainable for a significant portion of the population.

untog 8y ago

Tech is squeezed into hyper-expensive cities because, as illogical as it may seem, it's where a lot of workers want to live. As an industry, tech skews young. And a lot of young people want to live in urban environments full of culture and entertainment, and have a job that has a social dimension to it. Now that I'm older (thirties, married, kids) remote work from somewhere other than NYC seems appealing. But it didn't a few years ago.

realbarack 8y ago
That's true to a point. Still doesn't explain Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino etc.
- readhn 8y ago
  just an endless pursuit of materialism. you want something so you gravitate towards it. hence a lot of regular people are destroying their financial futures by staying in these super expensive areas.
  - askafriend 8y ago
    Destroying their financial future? None of my friends living in SF or NYC make less than $160k a year working as engineers. In fact, they make that nearly right out of college. The more senior engineers (5+ yrs exp) bring in $300k-500k a year. They save a significant amount of it, more than they would have saved in any other place. And they can leave at anytime to a low-COL place and buy a house in cash.
    - readhn 8y ago
      people earning 300-500K are very wealthy by any standard. these are not regular people im talking about. 160K salary in SF is probably equivalent to 75K in the middle of America? (considering food, rent/car/health expenses)
- wallflower 8y ago
  Those cities are in the heart of Silicon Valley. They have been good places for engineers to raise families for several generations since their companies were headquartered nearby. The migration of tech headquarters to SF is relatively new.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    In these discussions, I think a lot of people forget (or don't know) that most of these cities with rapidly increasing rents were losing population just 20 years ago and certainly 30 years ago. It's easy to be critical of infrastructure investment and zoning policies in some places but a lot of the demand is quite recent on the time scale that cities develop.
reno9111 8y ago
This is so silly. Denver, Austin, San Diego, Atlanta etc. are fine cities with vibrant urban cores full of culture and entertainment yet none of them require you to pay 3000$/mo for a decent apartment or pay millions to buy a low tier home. There is a mass delusion that SF/SV and NYC residents seem to have that it is impossible to match their lifestyles without paying astronomical numbers for housing and its just absurd.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > There is a mass delusion that SF/SV and NYC residents seem to have that it is impossible to match their lifestyles without paying astronomical numbers for housing and its just absurd. It's not a delusion. Sure, if you find the culture, entertainment, and other lifestyle features of Denver, Austin, San Diego, or Atlanta an acceptable substitute for NYC or SF Bay Area lifestyle, you can get that substitute a bit cheaper. Not everyone does (if they did, Bay Area and NYC prices would drop and those other places would climb.)
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    The culture and entertainment of the Bay Area is overrated compared to other metros. Everything closes early for some unfathomable reason. I'd say most transplants are there for the tech money. Good food scene, though.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > The culture and entertainment of the Bay Area is overrated compared to other metros. “Overrated” just means other people value it more than you do. But you should be happy, because that presents an opportunity you can exploit by satisfying your preferences more cheaply elsewhere.
      - Apocryphon 8y ago
        Certainly. It is mostly the Bay Area native in me who is jaded. Familiarity does breed contempt.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Tech is squeezed into hyper-expensive cities because, as illogical as it may seem, it's where a lot of workers want to live. That's a factor, but I think an even bigger set of factors is: (1) industry-focussed venture capital and related support infrastructure (particularly for startups) prefers proximity, (2) there are benefits to proximity to other firms in the industry other than capital and support structures, e.g., it's easier to pick up experienced workers as you expand if you don't have to get them to relocate, (3) With the money flowing into the industry, wherever it is concentrated is going to become expensive, because the number of dollars chasing housing and other goods is going to be high compared to places it isn't concentrated.
magduf 8y ago
It's not just young people. I'm in my forties, but divorced, and no kids, and the last thing I want is a big house in the suburbs. I want to live in a walkable urban environment full of culture, though also within convenient distance of outdoor hiking and cycling trails.

mlrtime 8y ago

Because we would rather live in NYC than Nashville. It's true NYC can be brutal if you don't make enough, but once you get over a certain threshold, there is no other place like it.

technotony 8y ago
I'm thinking of moving to NYC from San Francisco, while I bootstrap a new venture. It seems it should be cheaper but still have access to peer networks/potential hires and investors for when the time comes. Do you think that's right? What's the threshold you think you need to earn for it not to be brutal?
- hijinks 8y ago
  NYC area isn't like SF. You can go 40 minutes outside of SF and it's still expensive. It all depends where you want to live in NYC. Manhattan you'll want to make at least 150k to live alone. If you move outside then you have a lot more options but still be able to commute into the city easily. I lived in Manhattan for 7 years and SF area for 6. I now live outside of Denver and its by far the best move of my life.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    I hear nothing but complaints from people who have to commute into NYC. If you're not in Manhattan or the nicer parts of Brooklyn, you're easily adding 30 min to your door to door commute, plus the variance is huge due to the ever decreasing quality of the public transit.
- onemoresoop 8y ago
  min 100k if single but don't expect to save anything
  - e1g 8y ago
    +1. Looking around, most of my NYC peers are 25-35 with no kids, and a typical monthly spend is $6-7k. It's a good life, but not glamorous. Some months are substantially more expensive, almost no months are substantially cheaper.

bitrrrate 8y ago

I’ve been beating this drum for a while. It doesn’t make any logical sense why knowledge/tech workers have to live close to these expensive cities or find affordability by becoming a super commuter from an hour or more away. Sure younger people want to live in those cities but I would think it’d be a good retention policy to allow people to transition to a remote work option. Being able to live in a LCOL area means your tech salary actually counts for something. Not just paying rent on a overpriced apartment.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

Personality types. Over the past 25 years since you started, more people with higher social needs have entered the tech workforce and they desire highly dense places to live.

swiftcoder 8y ago
That might explain Manhattan and downtown Seattle, but Silicon Valley is... some sort of suburban hell hole that I can't picture any young person being head-over-heals about. I know plenty of folks who commute 2 hours each way from SF to the Valley, just so that they can live in a "real city".

Yhippa 8y ago

People go to where they want to be.

ilikehurdles 8y ago

I want money to be able to live in a nice city where I can walk to things, parks and arts are well funded, where the food is great, and where there are nearby cafes and bars. I could own a large McMansion in the burbs instead of my small brownstone in the city, but I prefer the urban living. I just don’t care about having any more bedrooms, and from my perspective the less yard I have to maintain, the less room I have to clean, the better. On the face-to-face comment: until my local cafe and bar operate a constant zoom meeting and my cycling club sets up rides inside of my home office, I don’t see internet connectivity as a replacement for real contact. I will say this though — there is a big part of me that wants to live in a mountain town in Colorado or Vermont. Convenient nature and having places to walk to — Problem is from my experience the residents are almost entirely people twice my age with a lot of old money. On the topic of Nashville, my buddy moved there from Boston. I honestly thought the city was quite fun (minus the humidity and the neighbors of the Airbnb blasting hellfire evangelical sermons on the radio for their morning lawn-mowing routine), but they’ve come to regret the decision because the running isn’t as good and socially right-wing politics still forces itself upon every space. Political compatibility, even for people who prefer to leave those conversations alone, is important.

sevensor 8y ago
Have you considered moving to the town where State U is located? Plentiful access to nature, well-educated community, Pho and independent coffee shops, affordable cost of living. This is the case in many states, since the State U was traditionally sited in a big tract of farmland.
- ilikehurdles 8y ago
  I lived in Austin and loved it but the heat got to me. I loved the food and nightlife in Nashville when I visited. Also thoroughly enjoyed Burlington VT and would love to live there some day. I wouldn’t mind ending up back in Boston again though. If that’s the kind of places you mean, then yeah. I bought a place in Denver now because it’s so much relatively cheaper than Boston while I’m making the same software engineer wage. I could only afford to buy a teensy tiny old studio or a spot in a garage in Boston for the cost of my centrally-located condo in Denver.

estsauver 8y ago

It's really, really hard to manage people remotely. It might be viable in technology only organizations where most of the product deliverables come in the format of pull requests, but if you're an organization with warehouses, field agents, sales people etc., it can get really hard. I think it's super easy to forget how much we're all just animals trying to do things that are way more complex than we're designed for. We have really great neural pathways for group management in person, from tone of voice, to posture to eye contact and other signalling. Everytime a manager says "Can you get this done sometime soon?" where they mean "sometime this week?" and an employee interprets it as "right now, please stress about this" you burn some political capital. When you're in the same room, it often comes across in tone and nonverbal queues and follow ups are way lower friction.

throwaway5752 8y ago
It really isn't that hard to manage distributed teams at all. I would say it is easier, because it forces you to be more systematic about how you measure productivity and hold your team accountable to commitments. It makes collaborative work (anything that would involve a whiteboard) a bit harder. However, as a manager, it is very hard to advance to director or higher levels. Having the full day of face time with mid/executive level is a big advantage. And it is hard to hire and introduces some difficult comp/HR challenges. Bringing it back to this topic, I think it makes a lot of sense as an IC or line manager to move to a 2nd or 3rd tier tech community for the quality of life balance.

yesimahuman 8y ago

It doesn't! There are a ton of people doing tech outside of these locales. I agree with you, I have no interest in living in either of those places and I'm building a VC-backed startup not in those places and it's working. Those of us opting out are going to be part of a revolution, and you just have to be okay with the sense that not everyone is going to understand it or have the same vision until it's all proven out. It's just like starting a company in that way (who are the real contrarians again?)

thedufer 8y ago

Remote communication simply isn't as good as in-person. There's a surprisingly large bandwidth communication channel in tone/body language that is easily lost, and quite small audio delays can throw off the rhythm of a conversation. It's no surprise that most of the best paying tech employers avoid remote work.

asdff 8y ago

As an employee, I'd rather work in a place where I can get a relevant job from dozens of different employers, made easier by overlapping networks, versus a city where I could only really work at 1 or 2 places. You can definitely have fun visiting Nashville, but if I moved there I'd quickly run out of new places to discover; nightlife and entertainment are concentrated in a few places and activities.

barrow-rider 8y ago
There is more to Nashville than Broadway mon ami.
- asdff 8y ago
  Where is it? There are areas of NYC and Los Angeles where you will find new cafes/restaurants/bars/clubs/shops on every block. You can set out walking a direction into the unknown and have a pretty decent night, knowing you will run into these attractions in every nook, not just the main drags, and despite living there for years you can discover new places every single day. In Nashville, would I have to uber around to disconnected, well known hotspots? How long until I know of every bar in Nashville that has people in it on a Friday night? I want to be able to constantly discover in my own city, not just when I go on trips out of town.

dmode 8y ago

As someone who lives in the SV suburbs, life is freaking AWESOME. My wife and I both work and we have a small kid. We make a lot of money so that I never have to check my bank account. And we are just mid level managers. We own two houses that have appreciated beyond our wildest dreams. I basically have my retirement savings after working here for only 7 years. Monetary benefits aside: - Both of us work in exciting mega unicorns in growth mode and with amazing benefits and work culture - The weather in SV is awesome year round - We can be outdoors 11 of 12 months - great for my daughter - SV is majority minority - so you can imagine the diversity along with all the food options - We love nature and it is virtually unlimited - SF has the best food scene in the US now (check latest Michelin reports) - I like the tech monoculture - Career choices are unlimited - CA government is very inclusive and responds to voter needs - I like the Ocean and also like Mountains - can be off to Tahoe every weekend in the winters - Amazing small towns in short distances - Napa, Sonoma, Healdsberg, Carmel, Big Sur etc. - Los Angeles is only 6 hrs away - Virtually unlimited things to do for kids - Many more

objektif 8y ago
Wow ok good for you.
- itchyouch 8y ago
  > We own two houses that have appreciated beyond our wildest dreams. Sure it's great for you, but your luck and timing isn't realistically attainable for a significant portion of the population.