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> Why do tech companies flock to California (LA/SF)? 1. California has laws surrounding non-compete, making it easier to poach from the Fairchild Semis, Hewlit

> Why do tech companies flock to California (LA/SF)? 1. California has laws surrounding non-compete, making it easier to poach from the Fairchild Semis, Hewlitt Packards, Intels, Sun Microsystems and Googles of the era. 2. It's easier to recruit out of Michigan than into it. California wisely keeps its snow in one place: Tahoe. 3. Diversity. As you point out, there's a ton of H1-B workers, and SF and LA have sizeable preexisting communities. It's just easier to be an immigrant or hyphenated-American in world class metro areas that can support a variety of ethnic and cultural clustering. 4. Public transit. Depressingly, the bay area still has better public transit than most other cities. Yes, the big companies still run coaches in the bay area, but that works in part because of density you won't see in cheaper, lower cost metros. And if you're recruiting internationally, the ability to commute to work without a drivers license or car kinda matters. 5. Access to money. There's a decent number of banks in SF's Financial district -- Wells Fargo and Charles Schwab are headquartered here. VISA is nearby in Foster City, and there's a number of VCs on Sand Hill Road you won't find in other cities.

juliansimioni 8y ago
> California wisely keeps its snow in one place: Tahoe Just wanted to say I love this line. I've always said that in California winter is opt-in, but that's even better :)
chrisco255 8y ago
3. Neither SF nor LA are particularly more diverse than many other major metro cities. SF has a lot of Asians (SF is 53% white and 35% Asian) and LA has a lot of Hispanics...but Atlanta has a lot of Black Americans (53%) and Dallas and Houston have large populations of Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites. Miami is over 70% Hispanic. NYC may be more diverse than any of them.
- estebank 8y ago
  The GP said > _It's just easier to be an immigrant or hyphenated-American in world class metro areas that can support a variety of ethnic and cultural clustering._ The fact that there aren't as many african-americans in the bay area (outside of a handful of locales), doesn't make the GP's point invalid. I'm an immigrant in SF, and there are few places in the US where I would feel remotely as comfortable. Even being "white" (latin american of southern european ascent) I have a noticeable accent. That accent has triggered abuse by an elderly woman right after the past presidential elections in an ice cream shop in Hayes Valley, SF. And that is without going into the countless cases of "involuntary micro-agressions" ("oh, we don't mean you guys", "you're one of the good ones", etc.). Outside of the bay area the landscape very quickly changes to white picket fences with two large pick up trucks and white crosses in the lawn, towns with multiple churches of different christian denominations. All of this within an hour of driving from SF. I wouldn't feel at home, and likely not be accepted as part of the community in places like this. Because there are so many immigrants in the bay area, that gives exposure to the native-born citizenry making them less likely to treat immigrants like the feared "other", as well as immigrants treating other immigrants of different origin decently, for the most part. I think these points are what the GP was referring to. The problem of lack of systematic racism and unequal opportunities for african-americans are still a big problem in the US as a whole, and in the bay area as well, but that doesn't immediately affects the entirety of the immigrant population.
  - burfog 8y ago
    FYI, in SF there are also multiple churches of different christian denominations. Most of them will welcome you, doing their best to make you feel at home and accepted as part of the community. It works best if you don't treat them like the feared "other".
    - estebank 8y ago
      I did not intend to needlessly bash on religion in general, but seeing (what felt to me like) a dozen churches in a town of <500 inhabitants was very surprising.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    You're comparing SF to rural America. They're of course quite different. But OP is asking about other major cities like Atlanta, Boston, Chicago etc. If you think those are anti immigrant racist homophobic etc hellholes, you might be stereotyping quite a bit yourself :)
    - killerdhmo 8y ago
      Or you haven’t lived in Boston, or Chicago — both cities facing major racial integration problems in the modern day
      - kgwgk 8y ago
        Unlike LA?
      - thousandautumns 8y ago
        Not problems that San Francisco isn't also having. People like to prop up SF as an example of inclusiveness, as if it isn't the pinnacle of gentrification. Things may feel inclusive if you are white/asian and working in tech. Ask a black or hispanic person if they feel like SF is a land of opportunity or inclusiveness. And the rest of California is just as bad. LA somehow has a reputation for inclusiveness despite being home to some of the most serious racial conflicts and explosions of racial violence in the last century. That California is somehow radically more inclusive than the rest of the country is a myth, but one they are exploiting very well.
- jessedhillon 8y ago
  Regional culture and political climate also matter: if you're non-white or remotely educated, you're probably not going to want to live in a place where they're flying the confederate flag over the capital and from the backs of pickup trucks, or debating the merits of teaching kids the Earth was made 7,000 years ago. Even if the city you live in has a reasonable culture, you're going to feel like you're in a besieged fortress of sanity.
  - giardini 8y ago
    Sounds like you already believe you're in a "besieged fortress of sanity".
    - jessedhillon 8y ago
      I grew up in a quite rural place here in CA and went to an evangelical high school, so I know what I'm missing.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  There's more to diversity than skin color. Immigrants from other countries look for people who can speak their own language, eat the same food, worship the same gods etc, and given that the bulk of SF's immigrants (in the tech industry) come from across the Pacific, these communities are much larger in SF (33% Asian) than Atlanta (3%).
- freyir 8y ago
  "Diversity" in this context is a politically-correct way of saying there is a large community of well-educated Indian immigrants on H1-B Visas living in Silicon Valley and working in the tech industry. Not San Francisco as much, but the South Bay (Santa Clara, Cupertino, San Jose, Sunnyvale, etc.).
  - akiselev 8y ago
    Or maybe they meant the large established-long-before-tech Asian communities in Sunset & Chinatown, the Latino/African American communities in Mission-Bayview, the Eastern Europeans in Richmond, or the Italians on Russian hill, the Russians sprinkled around Goddard, or the Vietnamese community in San Jose or .... I could go on and on. If all you do is focus on tech its really easy to miss the massive immigrant enclaves that have formed in the Bay Area and won't be driven out so easily.
    - freyir 8y ago
      Of course the Bay Area is actually diverse. But I’m skeptical that tech companies actually care about these communities. They care about close proximity to a large population of engineers.
      - Nasrudith 8y ago
        I think it is more about the attitudes than the numbers - there is a neophillia and xenophilia that is pro-diversity. They don't seem to particularly care about the resulting demographics and occasionally get caught with insensitive assumptions like algorithms that fail to detect dark skinned people due to bad assumptions about how light reflects but they don't like the close-mindedness of xenophobes and homophobes.
      - akiselev 8y ago
        I share your skepticism but take it a step further: can corporations actually care about something other than money? I don't think it even makes sense to anthropomorphize organizations that are governed by profit-before-all shareholders with limited liability and directors with a fiduciary duty to maximize returns. At the end of the day, the workers the tech companies are competing for do care and that's what matters.
- trophycase 8y ago
  I'd be willing to bet there are more undocumented immigrants than are a part of that breakdown. Also "asian" encompasses half the world unless they are using the classification in a different way... that's pretty diverse.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  regarding #3 -- I kind of despise the Valley in this regard. When you are a tech firm not in the valley, inevitably you get a middle-manager type that comes in and tries to emulate what the latest hip SV firm is doing to boost your street cred. When I look around the offices I have worked at in the South, and up in D.C. in the 00's and early 2010's, we have never had a diversity "problem". There was plenty of diversity, not just male/female diversity, but also multicultural diversity, and diversity of thought and opinion(I've actually worked with some conservatives! They are real!). SV to me pushes their "we have a white male broculture" projections out, so suddenly now it's everyone's problem. Now we have to be explicit with our "diversity" initiatives, despite the fact that we were already much more "diverse" than the SV intellectual and social monoculture you have now. Anyways, just kind of ranting, but yeah. SV's problems in tech somehow always branch out to be everyone else's problems that are in tech, at least media and high profile twitter accounts and bloggers would have you think that, but it isn't really so.
  - NavyNuke 8y ago
    SV doesn't have a "white male" broculture problem imo. Asians are overrepresented as are Jews, compared to their makeup of the general population, both of which don't identify as white.
    - twunde 8y ago
      SV culturally has a "white male" broculture problem. When people think of tech startups, that is the image they think of. On a different note, there are two major reasons why you might consider Asians and Jews overrepresented in SV. Jews have historically had major populations in NY, California, Florida and Massachusetts and Chicago[1]. Similarly, Asians have historically clustered in California, NY, Seattle. Asian populations have historically been much more spread out across the US, but some of the largest populations are in California, NY and Boston[2]. Additionally, Asians and Jews have high proportions of individuals working in STEM fields (doctors, engineers, etc) because if you're being discriminated against, in math/science you are either right or you are wrong whereas if you choose a liberal art field like english, there's much more room for teachers/professors to discriminate intentionally or not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_Jewish_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_Jewish_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Asian_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Asian_American...
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Wrong diversity. All of these places are industry towns. SF is tech, LA movies, Miami tourism and trade, Texas energy and chemicals, NYC Wall St and media. You wouldn’t start the next big startup in Houston, because who will leave a fat gig at the oil company? NYC is a little different because it’s historically more diverse from a business POV. SF is different because tech spans industries.
- dnr 8y ago
  Of those cities I've only spent time in the Bay Area and NYC, but NYC feels much more diverse than the Bay Area. The Bay Area has people of every race and ethnicity, but it feels very segregated both geographically and economically. People don't interact across ethnic lines as much (with a few prominent exceptions). In NYC, it doesn't feel like race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status are so tightly correlated.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    That's always been my impression of the US. Cultures seem ridiculously segregated - voluntarily. And that applies to hobbies and interests as much as it applies to race and politics. It's not that people don't mix, it's more that they define their identities by multiple tribal affiliations. And "tribal" doesn't just mean race, it means anything from Mac vs PC vs Linux, to frat houses, to financial traders, to progressive academics, to LARPers, to indie musicians, to YC applicants. Plus the usual political camps. There's a patchwork of scenes and monocultures which don't seem to have much to do with each other - which is a different and less permeable dynamic to just being interested in something, or working in some field.
    - krapp 8y ago
      Add language and religion to the list of tribal affiliations and replace racial segregation with ethnic segregation, and you have the way the US sees the rest of the West. It seems like we're all playing the same game, just with different pieces.
  - azernik 8y ago
    For economically-secure immigrant groups, that segregation is a feature rather than a bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19355273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19355273 > There's more to diversity than skin color. Immigrants from other countries look for people who can speak their own language, eat the same food, worship the same gods etc, and given that the bulk of SF's immigrants (in the tech industry) come from across the Pacific, these communities are much larger in SF (33% Asian) than Atlanta (3%).
dreamcompiler 8y ago
> California wisely keeps its snow in one place: Tahoe. Yes but Michigan is also not known for widespread mudslides, wildfires, and earthquakes.

juliansimioni 8y ago

> California wisely keeps its snow in one place: Tahoe Just wanted to say I love this line. I've always said that in California winter is opt-in, but that's even better :)

chrisco255 8y ago

3. Neither SF nor LA are particularly more diverse than many other major metro cities. SF has a lot of Asians (SF is 53% white and 35% Asian) and LA has a lot of Hispanics...but Atlanta has a lot of Black Americans (53%) and Dallas and Houston have large populations of Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites. Miami is over 70% Hispanic. NYC may be more diverse than any of them.

estebank 8y ago
The GP said > _It's just easier to be an immigrant or hyphenated-American in world class metro areas that can support a variety of ethnic and cultural clustering._ The fact that there aren't as many african-americans in the bay area (outside of a handful of locales), doesn't make the GP's point invalid. I'm an immigrant in SF, and there are few places in the US where I would feel remotely as comfortable. Even being "white" (latin american of southern european ascent) I have a noticeable accent. That accent has triggered abuse by an elderly woman right after the past presidential elections in an ice cream shop in Hayes Valley, SF. And that is without going into the countless cases of "involuntary micro-agressions" ("oh, we don't mean you guys", "you're one of the good ones", etc.). Outside of the bay area the landscape very quickly changes to white picket fences with two large pick up trucks and white crosses in the lawn, towns with multiple churches of different christian denominations. All of this within an hour of driving from SF. I wouldn't feel at home, and likely not be accepted as part of the community in places like this. Because there are so many immigrants in the bay area, that gives exposure to the native-born citizenry making them less likely to treat immigrants like the feared "other", as well as immigrants treating other immigrants of different origin decently, for the most part. I think these points are what the GP was referring to. The problem of lack of systematic racism and unequal opportunities for african-americans are still a big problem in the US as a whole, and in the bay area as well, but that doesn't immediately affects the entirety of the immigrant population.
- burfog 8y ago
  FYI, in SF there are also multiple churches of different christian denominations. Most of them will welcome you, doing their best to make you feel at home and accepted as part of the community. It works best if you don't treat them like the feared "other".
  - estebank 8y ago
    I did not intend to needlessly bash on religion in general, but seeing (what felt to me like) a dozen churches in a town of <500 inhabitants was very surprising.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  You're comparing SF to rural America. They're of course quite different. But OP is asking about other major cities like Atlanta, Boston, Chicago etc. If you think those are anti immigrant racist homophobic etc hellholes, you might be stereotyping quite a bit yourself :)
  - killerdhmo 8y ago
    Or you haven’t lived in Boston, or Chicago — both cities facing major racial integration problems in the modern day
    - kgwgk 8y ago
      Unlike LA?
    - thousandautumns 8y ago
      Not problems that San Francisco isn't also having. People like to prop up SF as an example of inclusiveness, as if it isn't the pinnacle of gentrification. Things may feel inclusive if you are white/asian and working in tech. Ask a black or hispanic person if they feel like SF is a land of opportunity or inclusiveness. And the rest of California is just as bad. LA somehow has a reputation for inclusiveness despite being home to some of the most serious racial conflicts and explosions of racial violence in the last century. That California is somehow radically more inclusive than the rest of the country is a myth, but one they are exploiting very well.
jessedhillon 8y ago
Regional culture and political climate also matter: if you're non-white or remotely educated, you're probably not going to want to live in a place where they're flying the confederate flag over the capital and from the backs of pickup trucks, or debating the merits of teaching kids the Earth was made 7,000 years ago. Even if the city you live in has a reasonable culture, you're going to feel like you're in a besieged fortress of sanity.
- giardini 8y ago
  Sounds like you already believe you're in a "besieged fortress of sanity".
  - jessedhillon 8y ago
    I grew up in a quite rural place here in CA and went to an evangelical high school, so I know what I'm missing.
jpatokal 8y ago
There's more to diversity than skin color. Immigrants from other countries look for people who can speak their own language, eat the same food, worship the same gods etc, and given that the bulk of SF's immigrants (in the tech industry) come from across the Pacific, these communities are much larger in SF (33% Asian) than Atlanta (3%).
freyir 8y ago
"Diversity" in this context is a politically-correct way of saying there is a large community of well-educated Indian immigrants on H1-B Visas living in Silicon Valley and working in the tech industry. Not San Francisco as much, but the South Bay (Santa Clara, Cupertino, San Jose, Sunnyvale, etc.).
- akiselev 8y ago
  Or maybe they meant the large established-long-before-tech Asian communities in Sunset & Chinatown, the Latino/African American communities in Mission-Bayview, the Eastern Europeans in Richmond, or the Italians on Russian hill, the Russians sprinkled around Goddard, or the Vietnamese community in San Jose or .... I could go on and on. If all you do is focus on tech its really easy to miss the massive immigrant enclaves that have formed in the Bay Area and won't be driven out so easily.
  - freyir 8y ago
    Of course the Bay Area is actually diverse. But I’m skeptical that tech companies actually care about these communities. They care about close proximity to a large population of engineers.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      I think it is more about the attitudes than the numbers - there is a neophillia and xenophilia that is pro-diversity. They don't seem to particularly care about the resulting demographics and occasionally get caught with insensitive assumptions like algorithms that fail to detect dark skinned people due to bad assumptions about how light reflects but they don't like the close-mindedness of xenophobes and homophobes.
    - akiselev 8y ago
      I share your skepticism but take it a step further: can corporations actually care about something other than money? I don't think it even makes sense to anthropomorphize organizations that are governed by profit-before-all shareholders with limited liability and directors with a fiduciary duty to maximize returns. At the end of the day, the workers the tech companies are competing for do care and that's what matters.
trophycase 8y ago
I'd be willing to bet there are more undocumented immigrants than are a part of that breakdown. Also "asian" encompasses half the world unless they are using the classification in a different way... that's pretty diverse.
jimmy1 8y ago
regarding #3 -- I kind of despise the Valley in this regard. When you are a tech firm not in the valley, inevitably you get a middle-manager type that comes in and tries to emulate what the latest hip SV firm is doing to boost your street cred. When I look around the offices I have worked at in the South, and up in D.C. in the 00's and early 2010's, we have never had a diversity "problem". There was plenty of diversity, not just male/female diversity, but also multicultural diversity, and diversity of thought and opinion(I've actually worked with some conservatives! They are real!). SV to me pushes their "we have a white male broculture" projections out, so suddenly now it's everyone's problem. Now we have to be explicit with our "diversity" initiatives, despite the fact that we were already much more "diverse" than the SV intellectual and social monoculture you have now. Anyways, just kind of ranting, but yeah. SV's problems in tech somehow always branch out to be everyone else's problems that are in tech, at least media and high profile twitter accounts and bloggers would have you think that, but it isn't really so.
- NavyNuke 8y ago
  SV doesn't have a "white male" broculture problem imo. Asians are overrepresented as are Jews, compared to their makeup of the general population, both of which don't identify as white.
  - twunde 8y ago
    SV culturally has a "white male" broculture problem. When people think of tech startups, that is the image they think of. On a different note, there are two major reasons why you might consider Asians and Jews overrepresented in SV. Jews have historically had major populations in NY, California, Florida and Massachusetts and Chicago[1]. Similarly, Asians have historically clustered in California, NY, Seattle. Asian populations have historically been much more spread out across the US, but some of the largest populations are in California, NY and Boston[2]. Additionally, Asians and Jews have high proportions of individuals working in STEM fields (doctors, engineers, etc) because if you're being discriminated against, in math/science you are either right or you are wrong whereas if you choose a liberal art field like english, there's much more room for teachers/professors to discriminate intentionally or not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_Jewish_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_Jewish_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Asian_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Asian_American...
Spooky23 8y ago
Wrong diversity. All of these places are industry towns. SF is tech, LA movies, Miami tourism and trade, Texas energy and chemicals, NYC Wall St and media. You wouldn’t start the next big startup in Houston, because who will leave a fat gig at the oil company? NYC is a little different because it’s historically more diverse from a business POV. SF is different because tech spans industries.
dnr 8y ago
Of those cities I've only spent time in the Bay Area and NYC, but NYC feels much more diverse than the Bay Area. The Bay Area has people of every race and ethnicity, but it feels very segregated both geographically and economically. People don't interact across ethnic lines as much (with a few prominent exceptions). In NYC, it doesn't feel like race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status are so tightly correlated.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  That's always been my impression of the US. Cultures seem ridiculously segregated - voluntarily. And that applies to hobbies and interests as much as it applies to race and politics. It's not that people don't mix, it's more that they define their identities by multiple tribal affiliations. And "tribal" doesn't just mean race, it means anything from Mac vs PC vs Linux, to frat houses, to financial traders, to progressive academics, to LARPers, to indie musicians, to YC applicants. Plus the usual political camps. There's a patchwork of scenes and monocultures which don't seem to have much to do with each other - which is a different and less permeable dynamic to just being interested in something, or working in some field.
  - krapp 8y ago
    Add language and religion to the list of tribal affiliations and replace racial segregation with ethnic segregation, and you have the way the US sees the rest of the West. It seems like we're all playing the same game, just with different pieces.
- azernik 8y ago
  For economically-secure immigrant groups, that segregation is a feature rather than a bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19355273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19355273 > There's more to diversity than skin color. Immigrants from other countries look for people who can speak their own language, eat the same food, worship the same gods etc, and given that the bulk of SF's immigrants (in the tech industry) come from across the Pacific, these communities are much larger in SF (33% Asian) than Atlanta (3%).

dreamcompiler 8y ago

> California wisely keeps its snow in one place: Tahoe. Yes but Michigan is also not known for widespread mudslides, wildfires, and earthquakes.