4 ms·

LOL, no. If you want to work in finance, the best city is NY. If you want to work in film/media, the best city is LA. If you want to work in tech, the best city

by rsj_hn 8y ago

LOL, no. If you want to work in finance, the best city is NY. If you want to work in film/media, the best city is LA. If you want to work in tech, the best city is SF/Silicon Valley. It may not be the best city to live in, but it's where you go if you want to be at the center of the action. SV is where you'll find the headquarters of Apple, Facebook, Google, Intel, Netflix, Oracle, HP, Cisco, Brocade, NVIDIA, Salesforce, Adobe, Seagate, Slack, Uber, Twitter, Quicken, Paypal, Gilead, Applied Materials, VMWare, Symantec, Juniper, Electronic Arts, Brocade, Xilinx and many, many others. Of the 10 largest tech companies by revenue, 7 are headquartered in Silicon Valley (the others are IBM, MSFT, Amazon) https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/21/ten-largest-us-tech-firms-2018-revenue-seen-topping-1-trillion.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/21/ten-largest-us-tech-firms-20... What major tech company has their HQ in NYC? Fog creek software? Reddit?

sincerely 8y ago
Why does it matter where the HQ is? I dont need to work in the city with 1000 tech employers, i only need one, the company i work for.
- speedster217 8y ago
  Have you lived in Silicon Valley? The amount that people from other companies talk to each other is incredible. You're using a technology? Oh just hop in the car and talk to the developers about your use case and help guide the development. You _can_ do that remotely, but having it happen in person is way more reliable
  - olcor 8y ago
    That doesn’t mean that people in NYC don’t talk to each other as much. Sure it might be easier to hop in the car and talk to developers in the valley. But I don’t just want to talk to developers (and even if I do, not necessarily developers of a tech company). Technology is primarily an enabler for the rest of the world, not just something significant in and of itself. I can still talk to developers in NYC. But developers are not the only ingredient of a project, company or ecosystem. I can also talk to the best domain experts in finance (different types, not just VC), media, law, health, government, advertising, academia, architecture, etc. all at one place with more ease than in SF. This gives me, a developer, more perspective than I can glean elsewhere. I agree with the GP that you’ll find a lot of pure tech in the valley. But the applications of that tech all have significant presence in New York in comparison to the valley.
- rsj_hn 8y ago
  Think about what that means -- in the entire history of New York, not a single start up began in NYC and grew to be successful and market dominant there. Not a single one. Seattle has been much more successful -- it created MSFT and Amazon. What did NYC create? Best example would probably be fog bugz. Given that NYC has been so successful at creating other kinds of companies and has a lot of talented people, this is a conspicuous gap, no? Austin, TX, has been far more successful at creating tech companies than NYC. Both are tiny specs of dust compared SV. So clearly there is some kind of difference between these places, no? Some reason why one place offers more opportunity than another in tech? SV has an incredibly high density of headquarters of the biggest tech firms. This is where the leadership is, where the most experienced engineers are, and where the institutional knowledge resides. Because attention is scarce and communication is costly, firms tend to keep the most strategic efforts closest and push less critical efforts farther out. As Dan Kaminsky used to say, "If you're not at HQ, you're not part of the conversation". Individual contributors can be remote and support/sales/backoffice staff can be in satellite offices all over, but the key roles will be concentrated around HQ. Now go back to finance. There are lots of bank teller jobs in Phoenix. Wells Fargo has a lot of staff there, so does Bank of America. But if you want to have a career in finance, you are going to have more opportunities in NYC where the HQ of so many FIRE firms is concentrated, and not in Phoenix, even though there are lots of bank tellers and back office managers that work in Phoenix. The types of jobs you can have are just different. The opportunities, institutional knowledge, mentoring opportunities, social networks, level of responsibility -- it's different. It may seem unfair, but that's how it goes. NYC is basically Phoenix when it comes to tech -- a lot of backoffice and sales positions, and a bunch of engineering satellite positions, but not a single major tech company is headquartered there.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    In the entire history of New York, not a single start up began in NYC and grew to be successful and market dominant there. Outside of SV, "startup" is a pejorative term for a business that doesn't know how to make money. So you're right, New York doesn't have any startups that grew to be successful. They do, however, have thousands of success businesses, including some extremely large businesses that were once as market dominant as the tech companies are today.
- ThrustVectoring 8y ago
  In short: BATNA. Your salary is highly dependent on what the next-best thing you could be doing if your employer didn't hire you. If you live in a city where only your employer hires developers, your next best option sucks, so you can be forced to either move out or accept an uncompetitive offer. If you live in the SF Bay Area, you can walk out the door of Facebook on a Friday and into Google on a Monday, which means that both companies must compensate you handsomely in order to keep you around.
  - lm28469 8y ago
    When I see the cost of living / quality of life in SV I'm glad I'm back in Europe. You do you, but for me salary isn't everything: social security, work hours, amount of vacation days, parental leaves, job security, commute time, &c.
    - s3r3nity 8y ago
      This. The marginal increase in salary that you might get moving to SF is almost guaranteed to be dwarfed by the net increase in cost of living from moving from virtually anywhere in the country to SF. Therefore net income actually goes down. I understand the numbers seem like they look good ("omg $150k is higher than the $100k i'm making in smaller city X!), but the BATNA isn't really a BATNA, as the market dynamics are different...it's almost like propaganda with no factual basis at this point. I'd take my fewer work hours (due to easier commute,) nice take-home, a house, etc. over an SF offer any day.* *Everyone has their price, and sometimes the argument doesn't hold if the offer is _crazy_ high to make the argument above false...but that's the rare exception, not a rule.
ghobs91 8y ago
Sure the title may be jumping the gun a bit, but you're severely overhyping SF and underestimating NYC with your comment. The fact that Fog Creek and Reddit (moved to SF) were the companies that came to mind shows that you don't know the NYC tech landscape well. On top of the condensed list below NYC has Columbia, NYU, and Cornell Tech in terms of talent pool, and one of the most extensive transit systems in the world. 1. Bloomberg 2. Oath (AOL + Yahoo) 3. Blue Apron 4. Buzzfeed 5. Tumblr 6. Etsy 7. AppNexus 8. Flatiron Health 9. Oscar Health 10. Shutterstock 11. Squarespace 12. IAC (Tinder, Match.com, OKCupid, etc) 13. Zocdoc 14. Compass 15. Casper 16. MongoDB 17. Warby Parker 18. Vimeo 19. Betterment 20. Classpass 21. DigitalOcean 22. Foursquare 23. Fanduel 24. Stackoverflow 25. SeatGeek 26. Birchbox etc.
- carljv 8y ago
  It’s interesting to see how the definition of “tech company” has expanded. Only one or two of these companies create and sell software or technology. These are startups, maybe, and I think we can talk about where the “innovative” companies are. But these are companies that run platforms online, or use the web to sell products in novel ways. They seem very different from most of the companies on the parent comment’s list.
  - ghobs91 8y ago
    This is partly a side effect of tech becoming so big, it's segmenting into products vs services. For example, Tinder isn't directly selling software to anyone, it's selling a dating service that runs exclusively on software. You could say the same about Facebook, what software is it selling directly to consumers? None. It's selling a social network service to its users and an ad network service to its clients, built entirely on software.
    - romwell 8y ago
      Sure. Tinder and Facebook are tech firms, and so is Bloomberg. That mattress company you put on the list isn't. Lines in the sand, yadda yadda, slapping a website on a store doesn't make it "tech".

by rsj_hn 8y ago

sincerely 8y ago

Why does it matter where the HQ is? I dont need to work in the city with 1000 tech employers, i only need one, the company i work for.

speedster217 8y ago
Have you lived in Silicon Valley? The amount that people from other companies talk to each other is incredible. You're using a technology? Oh just hop in the car and talk to the developers about your use case and help guide the development. You _can_ do that remotely, but having it happen in person is way more reliable
- olcor 8y ago
  That doesn’t mean that people in NYC don’t talk to each other as much. Sure it might be easier to hop in the car and talk to developers in the valley. But I don’t just want to talk to developers (and even if I do, not necessarily developers of a tech company). Technology is primarily an enabler for the rest of the world, not just something significant in and of itself. I can still talk to developers in NYC. But developers are not the only ingredient of a project, company or ecosystem. I can also talk to the best domain experts in finance (different types, not just VC), media, law, health, government, advertising, academia, architecture, etc. all at one place with more ease than in SF. This gives me, a developer, more perspective than I can glean elsewhere. I agree with the GP that you’ll find a lot of pure tech in the valley. But the applications of that tech all have significant presence in New York in comparison to the valley.
rsj_hn 8y ago
Think about what that means -- in the entire history of New York, not a single start up began in NYC and grew to be successful and market dominant there. Not a single one. Seattle has been much more successful -- it created MSFT and Amazon. What did NYC create? Best example would probably be fog bugz. Given that NYC has been so successful at creating other kinds of companies and has a lot of talented people, this is a conspicuous gap, no? Austin, TX, has been far more successful at creating tech companies than NYC. Both are tiny specs of dust compared SV. So clearly there is some kind of difference between these places, no? Some reason why one place offers more opportunity than another in tech? SV has an incredibly high density of headquarters of the biggest tech firms. This is where the leadership is, where the most experienced engineers are, and where the institutional knowledge resides. Because attention is scarce and communication is costly, firms tend to keep the most strategic efforts closest and push less critical efforts farther out. As Dan Kaminsky used to say, "If you're not at HQ, you're not part of the conversation". Individual contributors can be remote and support/sales/backoffice staff can be in satellite offices all over, but the key roles will be concentrated around HQ. Now go back to finance. There are lots of bank teller jobs in Phoenix. Wells Fargo has a lot of staff there, so does Bank of America. But if you want to have a career in finance, you are going to have more opportunities in NYC where the HQ of so many FIRE firms is concentrated, and not in Phoenix, even though there are lots of bank tellers and back office managers that work in Phoenix. The types of jobs you can have are just different. The opportunities, institutional knowledge, mentoring opportunities, social networks, level of responsibility -- it's different. It may seem unfair, but that's how it goes. NYC is basically Phoenix when it comes to tech -- a lot of backoffice and sales positions, and a bunch of engineering satellite positions, but not a single major tech company is headquartered there.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  In the entire history of New York, not a single start up began in NYC and grew to be successful and market dominant there. Outside of SV, "startup" is a pejorative term for a business that doesn't know how to make money. So you're right, New York doesn't have any startups that grew to be successful. They do, however, have thousands of success businesses, including some extremely large businesses that were once as market dominant as the tech companies are today.
ThrustVectoring 8y ago
In short: BATNA. Your salary is highly dependent on what the next-best thing you could be doing if your employer didn't hire you. If you live in a city where only your employer hires developers, your next best option sucks, so you can be forced to either move out or accept an uncompetitive offer. If you live in the SF Bay Area, you can walk out the door of Facebook on a Friday and into Google on a Monday, which means that both companies must compensate you handsomely in order to keep you around.
- lm28469 8y ago
  When I see the cost of living / quality of life in SV I'm glad I'm back in Europe. You do you, but for me salary isn't everything: social security, work hours, amount of vacation days, parental leaves, job security, commute time, &c.
  - s3r3nity 8y ago
    This. The marginal increase in salary that you might get moving to SF is almost guaranteed to be dwarfed by the net increase in cost of living from moving from virtually anywhere in the country to SF. Therefore net income actually goes down. I understand the numbers seem like they look good ("omg $150k is higher than the $100k i'm making in smaller city X!), but the BATNA isn't really a BATNA, as the market dynamics are different...it's almost like propaganda with no factual basis at this point. I'd take my fewer work hours (due to easier commute,) nice take-home, a house, etc. over an SF offer any day.* *Everyone has their price, and sometimes the argument doesn't hold if the offer is _crazy_ high to make the argument above false...but that's the rare exception, not a rule.

ghobs91 8y ago

Sure the title may be jumping the gun a bit, but you're severely overhyping SF and underestimating NYC with your comment. The fact that Fog Creek and Reddit (moved to SF) were the companies that came to mind shows that you don't know the NYC tech landscape well. On top of the condensed list below NYC has Columbia, NYU, and Cornell Tech in terms of talent pool, and one of the most extensive transit systems in the world. 1. Bloomberg 2. Oath (AOL + Yahoo) 3. Blue Apron 4. Buzzfeed 5. Tumblr 6. Etsy 7. AppNexus 8. Flatiron Health 9. Oscar Health 10. Shutterstock 11. Squarespace 12. IAC (Tinder, Match.com, OKCupid, etc) 13. Zocdoc 14. Compass 15. Casper 16. MongoDB 17. Warby Parker 18. Vimeo 19. Betterment 20. Classpass 21. DigitalOcean 22. Foursquare 23. Fanduel 24. Stackoverflow 25. SeatGeek 26. Birchbox etc.

carljv 8y ago
It’s interesting to see how the definition of “tech company” has expanded. Only one or two of these companies create and sell software or technology. These are startups, maybe, and I think we can talk about where the “innovative” companies are. But these are companies that run platforms online, or use the web to sell products in novel ways. They seem very different from most of the companies on the parent comment’s list.
- ghobs91 8y ago
  This is partly a side effect of tech becoming so big, it's segmenting into products vs services. For example, Tinder isn't directly selling software to anyone, it's selling a dating service that runs exclusively on software. You could say the same about Facebook, what software is it selling directly to consumers? None. It's selling a social network service to its users and an ad network service to its clients, built entirely on software.
  - romwell 8y ago
    Sure. Tinder and Facebook are tech firms, and so is Bloomberg. That mattress company you put on the list isn't. Lines in the sand, yadda yadda, slapping a website on a store doesn't make it "tech".