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U.S. tech inventors are highly clustered because of idea spillover
- gumby 7y agoI am shocked by how low Boston ranks and how well Austin does (note: I have worked on both but live and prefer it in the Bay Area). I know patents are being used as a proxy so are an imperfect standard but Austin isn't a huge place and Boston really is a powerhouse. I'm also surprised, though less so, by NY's ranking -- but it's a huge diverse economy, plus has a lot of lawyers :-).
- bsder 7y agoAustin is the 11th largest city in the US, now (quite a bit larger than Boston, for example). That's kinda big.
- enraged_camel 7y agoIt's also one of the fastest growing cities in the US.
- burlesona 7y agoThat's just not true. Austin Metro is 2.17M people, Boston Metro is 4.88M. Boston is also part of the broader "Bos-Wash" chain of 50 Million people, while Texas has about 29 Million people. Sources: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Austin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Austin 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Boston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Boston 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas Disclaimer: I'm from Austin. My friends and family really think it's a big deal... but, it's only a medium deal :)
- bsder 7y agoIf you pull in that far for Boston, then you're pulling in San Antonio into the same metropolitan area for Austin. And my point still stands.
- burlesona 7y agoI'm sorry, that's just not realistic. The census folks know what they're doing, and when they map out the census areas they factor in the commuting patterns and economic overlap between these areas. Austin and San Antonio are close by, but there's a noticeable gap, and nearly no one lives in Austin and works in San Antonio or vice versa. Austin and San Antonio don't have the same housing prices, salaries, etc. Contrast that to a place like DFW where the boundaries all blur together and people cross-commute all over the region, and consequently they're lumped together in the census area. To put this one last way, the census area described as Boston is about 60 minute driving radius around the central city. On the best of times you could make it from downtown Austin to downtown San Antonio in ~80 minutes, and in practice they each have distinct commuting sheds of 45-60 minutes that partially overlap around San Marcos. Austin is great, and also it's half the population of Boston :)
- selimthegrim 7y agoThe bigger question is why is Houston still a gigantic black hole techwise?
- msandford 7y agoBecause it's awash in oil money and big companies who want interchangeable cogs for their .NET machines. It's also about institutional knowledge. It's (relatively) easy to find people in Houston who understand the value in spending $10mm to drill an oil well which has an 80%+ chance to make a single digit multiplier of your money. There's less cultural knowledge of spending that same amount of money for much smaller chance of a much, much bigger payout.
- pm90 7y agoIt depends on what you're asking. Apple, Google etc. know that their employees probably prefer Austin so that's why they're there. A lot of software firms servicing Energy companies are based in Austin since its so close anyways e.g. https://mineralsoft.com/ https://mineralsoft.com/.
- burlesona 7y agoRelated: if you want to see how different urban areas stack up, this is the best list to use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar... By that list Boston is #10 and Austin is #37 in the US, which matches how different the two cities "feel" in my experience as well.
- chrisco255 7y agoThose numbers are from 2010. Austin has grown a tremendous amount since 2010.
- chrshawkes 7y agoI see these false claims about size a lot, especially spread out huge Texas cities. A lot of people claim Dallas is bigger than DC but DC has way more people, especially if you add in Baltimore and or the millions driving down 95 every day. I was recently in San Antonio and Austin. Both seem rather small compared to DC or Boston. DC and Baltimore should effectively be added together into one hub and that puts it well into 3rd place and ahead of Dallas for actual urban areas.
- mkhpalm 7y agoAustin is 30th largest. 11th right now is actually Phoenix AZ.
- bsder 7y agoWikipedia certainly disagrees with you, what is your source of data? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
- mkhpalm 7y agoMostly the US Census and the US Office of Management and Budget I'm talking specifically about metro areas or "cities" by economic and statistical terms. What people mean when they refer to places like New York City, Chicago, Austin, Houston, LA, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistical_areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...
- ma2rten 7y agoYou'd also think that LA would be up there.
- mdorazio 7y agoI've been thinking that for the 13 years I've lived in LA, and somehow the city still completely sucks at tech. Silicon Beach is basically a joke in comparison to any actual tech hub - the salaries suck, the companies are largely exactly what you'd expect from LA cliches (marketing, fashion, sports, entertainment, etc.), and the success stories are few and far between. These days it seems like there's more going on in Irvine than there is in LA. (If you don't believe me, just look at HN's "Who's Hiring" posts.) Part of the problem is probably that LA is so close to the Bay Area - it's easy for tech talent to move up the coast or even semi-commute there instead of building a new hub.
- Teknoman117 7y agoI work at the Orange County office of a fairly sizable Bay Area company, and to be honest, I've not had an incredible amount of desire to move to the bay because the OC salary is basically the same (maybe better) after factoring in the difference in cost of living. That and in OC I can live 5 miles / 10 minutes from the office whereas I don't know how far/long I'd have to commute to live in the Bay. Admittedly, I don't know what the OC startup scene is like, I've got student loans that can't be paid with equity...
- bryanmgreen 7y agoAs a native and current Angelino, if the city wants to grow tech, it needs capital. We don't have the businesses, can't keep talent, and cost of living is too high to survive without a good salary. Irvine, despite being an excruciatingly boring cookie-cutter place, is slightly cheaper to live and has the Silicon Valley overflow offices. A lot of talent starts in LA, but it gets immediately poached by literally every other city. If you don't have a Hollywood tech job, it's grim. I really want to stay, but can see a realistic/near future where I leave. (But I'm not going back to Irvine ever again)
- burlesona 7y agoI'm also surprised by Austin's rank. I'm from the area, but moved to SF a while back for much better engineering work. I wouldn't mind moving back some day, but haven't seen many jobs or much upward mobility that would make me want to go back. There are a lot of tech companies but they are largely smaller / regional, or are the cost centers of bigger companies (support, back office stuff). I get the impression that's changing, though. It would be great to see ATX keep booming and reach the level of say, the Seattle tech scene.
- chrisco255 7y agoCurrently, Google has a 35 story building under construction downtown, Apple is expanding its Austin presence both with devs and manufacturing (new Mac Pro to be built here), Amazon and Facebook also expanding hiring here. A look at LinkedIn job openings shows VMWare, Walmart, Microsoft, Dell, Visa, Cloudflare, Mozilla, Auth0, Blizzard, and AMD all hiring here. I think Austin still lacks HQ anchors of bigger tech companies save for Dell. But the developer presence is absolutely growing.
- steveklabnik 7y agoI moved to Austin back in Feburary and I've met more folks from SF than folks from Austin.
- deepnotderp 7y agoAustin has a deep tech network, especially around certain sub areas.
- gumby 7y agoThat’s unquestionably true (UT is amazing, there are research labs, AMD, ApPle and more...) but it’s small. Perhaps I should have been more clear.
- zaphod12 7y agoKeep in mind NY is massively larger than any of these other places. Per capita, it's actually pretty low.
- swampthinker 7y agoI'll say it until I'm blue in the face, Boston built the Valley.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoLooks like some people haven't heard of Route 128 and not the Johnathon Richmond song either
- thrower123 7y agoGoing by patents is kind of a weird metric, when so many technology patents are such complete garbage. And what is not garbage is almost entirely corporate-driven. It's not like people are inventing things in their back sheds and filing patents like they were 100 years ago.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoTo be fair, the idea of patenting a lot of what we call "tech" these days is probably clustered for the same idea: most people wouldn't think of patenting software unless they're at or around companies that glorify patent recipients and incentivizing more. Still "idea spillover". But for real, that's probably as close as they can get to studying this with easily obtainable, easily quantifiable data.
- mncharity 7y ago> that's probably as close as they can get to studying this with easily obtainable, easily quantifiable data The abstract (I didn't try scihub, but the paper isn't available from his berkeley page either) worryingly blurs "inventors", patent creation, and "[US] macroeconomic benefits". Approaches to patents vary greatly with industry and business plan. Both of which vary with region. And their correspondence to national benefit is even more diverse. Number of researchers might serve as a useful cross-check. BLS Occupational Employment Statistics has categories like "Medical Scientists". But what portion of software innovation is done by "Computer and Information Research Scientists"? What portion is patented? One might easily imagine innovators shifting from dispersed general industry, to concentrated regions and companies emphasizing patents, with an associated increase in patent productivity, but net innovation and economic loss. Number of IP lawyers per million population needs a lot of correction to serve as a proxy for the economic benefits of innovation. At a time when we're in a big trade war, in no small part from trying to impose our industrial policy, I wonder if software engineering as a profession is fulfilling an obligation to clearly communicate its experience of just how sensitive impacts are to all the knobs and dials of patent law and policy, and how easily it goes severely net negative. When I encounter economists assuming a general connection between patents and societal innovation across very dissimilar industries, I wonder which of us is failing the other.
- paggle 7y agoI'd like to see this analysis for just independent inventors. From my experience, what really drives patent production is being employed by companies that prioritize patent production... and the places where these industries are concentrated will tend to dominate patent production by volume.
- Apocryphon 7y agoWill the existing Bay Area juggernaut ever claw north to Sacramento or south to Monterey, then San Luis Obispo, I wonder.
- mattmaroon 7y agoIt sure feels like they are implying causation where we just really see correlation.
- selimthegrim 7y agoI can't believe the census bureau thinks Bogalusa is part of the New Orleans metro area. The last anyone here heard about them was either the state taking over their finances or water system or that scandal where some reasonably ranking cop had KKK robes in his barn.
- thesausageking 7y agoI'm very suspicious of these conclusions based on the dataset. Equating number of patents with "productivity" is questionable and leads to a lot of confounders. For example, most patents are filed by large companies like IBM, which filed 2,000 patents on cloud computing in 2018 alone. Large companies like IBM value patents more than startups and have dedicated teams that help employees make tons of filings. I would bet this is part of why NY-NJ-PA, where IBM is headquartered, does better than you'd expect. And, Boston, which has no very large patent filers, does worse than you'd expect. The 12% gain in "productivity" from moving maybe more to do with inventors joining companies that encourage them to file more patents than any real increase in their output.
- m463 7y agoI would agree, but there seem to be two fields: "Assignee" which would list IBM and aramonk new york and "Inventors" which list the employee names and the city where they individually reside. IBM employees in other parts of the country show up outside new york https://patents.justia.com/assignee/international-business-machines-corporation https://patents.justia.com/assignee/international-business-m...
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- jgmjgm 7y agoI think the other cause for inflation is that software patents can be rather dubious compared to other fields. It's easier to claim something is a patent when it is really quite trivial (example: one-click shopping). This is harder to in other fields.
- lozaning 7y agoI dont recall if it was an official policy or more of a guideline, but when I interned at IBM in college if you had less than ~15 patents to your name you'd never be promoted to manager.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoIt's not an ideal metric, but I can't think of a better one.
- Apocryphon 7y agoWondering why the Research Triangle isn't on this list.