13 ms·

Tech workers swore off the Bay Area, now they’re coming back

• eaceaser 5y ago
  Literally six months ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/technology/san-francisco-covid-work-moving.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/technology/san-francisco-...
  • sjg007 5y ago
    Umm that would be 6 months ago.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • eaceaser 5y ago
      i'm dumb
  • compiler-guy 5y ago
    It's almost like a trend can change over time. Especially with the rise of vaccines and the progress on pandemic control.
• Maledictus 5y ago
  https://archive.is/2mLaH https://archive.is/2mLaH
• wil421 5y ago
  Who pays for these kinds of articles? Is there some PR firm Big Tech funds to get these kinds of articles? Just doesn't seem like the type of stuff NYTimes really cares about but I guess clicks is all that matters.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • 8458e112e7b2 5y ago
    It is quite clear that with these types of articles, NYTimes is pushing an agenda.
    • NationalPark 5y ago
      It isn't quite clear to me. What agenda and who does it benefit? Where's the connection to the New York Times itself?
      • wil421 5y ago
        Not sure but everyone they asked said they would like to go back to the office. I don't think a single person said no I don't want to go back to the office full or part time. Seems biased.
      • jmeister 5y ago
        The decline of SF is seen as an indictment of progressivism run amok. From a card-carrying progressive Ezra Klein: “If progressivism can’t work there, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/california-san-francisco-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/california-san-fr...
        • salt-thrower 5y ago
          How is massive consolidation of wealth for VCs and unicorn startups, fueled by a speculative investment environment, seen as "progressive?"
          • refurb 5y ago
            That’s a bit of a cop out. The Bay Area had some of the most progressive politicians and progressive policies in the country. I’ve seen plenty of progressives claim “they aren’t true progressives” but that comes across as a bit of a “no true Scotsman” argument that you hear from defenders of communism. And it begs the question - if no one has been able to attain “true” whatever, is it really even an option?
• gd2 5y ago
  We should have learned by now don't NY Times articles about the City.
• dleslie 5y ago
  Anecdotally, I've had a few Bay Area friends say that their management is itching to fill seats once again. Management really loves to see their chattel in their pens. ;)
• prohobo 5y ago
  Honest question: why would any new tech entrepreneur want to move to SF? The prices suck, and if you need to improve your network you can meet the vast majority of tech people online (IRC, Discord, email, online conferences). Weather?
  • ghaff 5y ago
    It is a major tech center. Probably easier to get VC money, make serendipitous connections, maybe hire talent. (Though, arguably, the advantages are less than they used to be and the disadvantages greater.) And not weather directly but there are a fair number of tech people who, to the hiring point, have trouble imaging living other places because of some combination of weather and culture (and choice of jobs without having to maybe move to a different city in another state).
    • commandlinefan 5y ago
      > maybe hire talent Are most of the bay area developers bay area natives? I was under the impression they were mostly immigrants under H1B contracts that could live anywhere in the US.
      • ghaff 5y ago
        I doubt if they are mostly H1B immigrants but, yes, they could mostly work anywhere in the US. But many went to school in CA and decided to stay there or, to my other point, they like living in CA for whatever reason. I don't and never have lived in CA but I've spent a lot of time there and I do see the attraction other than CoL and some other downsides. And there are certainly areas of the US that for me would heavily weigh against any employment opportunity offered there. (Though I'm full remote at this point anyway.)
      • nine_zeros 5y ago
        A non trivial amount of strong immigrant engineers are in SV. Ask me how hard it is to hire hundreds of engineers without faang funding in a tier 2 city.
• bgentry 5y ago
  I moved to Austin in November after 10 years in the Bay Area and a lifetime in different parts of California. Not a chance we will move back, certainly not for decades. The most refreshing part of the change is that people are genuinely nicer and more friendly around here than anywhere I lived in California (OC, SD, SF, Berkeley, Stockton for college). I really didn’t expect that, which I think was probably due to crude stereotypes Californians like to spread about Texas. Ultimately I think the grind of just trying to live a decent life in the crowded/expensive parts of CA takes its toll on the populace. The weather takes some adjusting, but not more than it took to adjust to the Bay Area fogginess for this SoCal native. Most of the year it’s beautiful out here.
  • okareaman 5y ago
    I've been to Austin. I felt trapped in a flat plane of existence in Texas. I need mountains to escape to on my time off. But as a native Californian, I hope a lot of people move out to Texas. Several million would be a good start.
    • bgentry 5y ago
      Did you spend any time in the hill country on the south/west parts of town? They have a very different feel than the flat parts.
      • ghaff 5y ago
        I've been there. It's nice but it's not "the mountains" in the sense of Santa Cruz much less the Sierras. I'm pretty sure I'd feel a lack of recreation opportunities to my liking in the Austin area.
      • okareaman 5y ago
        Yes, they're nice but it's like comparing skiing in New England with skiing in the Rockies or Sierras.
        • stephencanon 5y ago
• ramesh31 5y ago
  The bay during the 2010s was a very special time and place. Hard to understand if you weren't there. I've never felt a sense of community and energy and excitement like that anywhere else. Not to mention all the free pizza and beer. If COVID is over and that world comes back, I'd love to return. But right now there doesn't seem to be much point.
  • Radim 5y ago
    Isn't "very special time and place for community, energy and excitement" a function of your age, more than anything else? Everybody experiences their special unique unrepeatable time and place. It doesn't matter which decade they lived, or where. For me, it was the early 90s in post-communist Czechoslovakia. Also, "hard to understand if you weren't there". Free pizza and beer might not hold the same sway they did 10 years ago. You cannot step into the same river twice, etc.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • jstepka 5y ago
      The internet exploded post financial crash. The iphone invented a whole new platform for ideas. The economy moved substantially online during this time. It was a transformative moment in technology being driven out of silicon valley / sf.
      • ghaff 5y ago
        I think that's true although I also think that the past decade has been a pretty good time to be in tech broadly. I'm not sure it's really specific to the Bay Area/SF although it may be more obvious there because of how concentrated it is. (And, as you say, an outsized amount of the most visible tech came out of (I'd say) the West Coast.
  • scruple 5y ago
    > It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant... > Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971 I'm pretty sure people have been saying this about the Bay Area since the Gold Rush.
• refurb 5y ago
  The answer is FOMO which the millennial generation has heaps of. That’ll keep them coming back for a while at least.
• yardie 5y ago
  Most of these articles were written from a certain perspective for a certain demographic. I have friends with kids, who are minorities, who have decent/good paying jobs and they never entertained the idea for a second of moving from the Bay Area. We chatted weighing the good and bad of going full remote and moving to a less expensive city. Racism in SF or LA is bad, but it's a known quantity. Being a minority and having to deal with racism in Boise, Idaho, for example, was something they didn't feel comfortable with. Also, as a Miami native who's been to some of the meetups and gatherings (we never really shut down) it's been interesting. So far I've seen more of the finance and marketing side of tech companies than the tech side. I've been meeting with different startups to learn more of their tech stack and to see if they're recruiting and rarely has the architect been there. I'm not sure how that bodes for Miami being a tech incubator if the SWEs are so hard to find.
  • the_third_wave 5y ago
    What is it suddenly with all this talk about racism? > Racism in SF or LA is bad... > ...having to deal with racism in Boise, Idaho, for example, was something they didn't feel comfortable with... Who are those racists and in what way do they express their racism? I'm a European who has been on your side of the Atlantic and Pacific quite often for work- and leisure-related purposes over a period of several decades. If I can believe the current narrative things have been going from bad to worse to black people walk the streets in fear of their lives from racist cops in the last few years. This did not use to be the case, America was the "melting pot" or "salad bowl" or whatever metaphor you want to use where people divided by country of origin, religion, personal story and - yes - skin colour all came together under the stars and stripes to celebrate their country on the 4th of July. Now that same flag is being called a racist symbol by leading politicians, the 4th of July supposedly celebrates independence for only part of the population and more of such nonsensical inflammatory political rhetoric. Either everyone has been blind for decades or the current narrative about racism is a lie meant to achieve some political purpose. I do not believe the former to be true so the latter seems to be the answer but that makes me wonder why the parent poster brought up the bad racism in SF and LA and the racism in Boise, Idaho. Maybe I should point out that I use the traditional definition of the word racism as can be found in printed copies of dictionaries and encyclopedias from a few years ago. Is that the change which made it possible to claim racism is everywhere and if so, why do people use the new definition of the word?
• abea 5y ago
  It's almost as if we shouldn't generalize short term trends in the middle of a generational event into long term predictions. 
• oceanplexian 5y ago
  I'd love to come back, but the problem isn't with the city, it's the political situation. Who wants to start a company or a business if the local government can arbitrarily shut down your office for several months? Who wants to live in a city that could shut down bars, restaurants, and theaters for a year. I'd rather make my own decisions based on my personal health situation. For several months a vaccinated individual and business owner could not consensually do business without a face mask. Where is the science in that? Things might be different if there were no other options, but the US is a big place. There is a lot of competition, and life is too short to sacrifice years of your life for the whims of some bureaucrat. Ironically this is the same reason I moved to San Francisco in the first place; it was a place where diverse people and cultures had the freedom to express themselves.
  • gamblor956 5y ago
    So you don't want to do business in CA, NY, Europe, Great Britain, Singapore, China, India, Australia, New Zealand, or Mexico, to name a few? Basically, you don't want to start a business in any of the world's biggest economies, or in the places with the best tech scenes or financing opportunities? Activities were shutdown because of a massive global pandemic the likes of which the world hasn't seen for over a century. 4 million people are dead, and counting, and there have been at least 4 surges related to new strains spreading. And you're leaving/left because you had to wear a face mask? That is not the hill to die on.
    • oceanplexian 5y ago
      The refusal to follow the CDC guidelines for vaccinated individuals and masks was simply a good example of a government that was/is not interested in following the science, and demonstrates that CA is not going to act rationally in a public health situation. That's not an environment I would want to risk starting a business or investing in.
      • gamblor956 5y ago
        It sounds like you have an ideological issue rather than a scientific one. CA's lockdowns were based on scientific evidence that COVID19 spreads through the air. Requiring masks was based on that evidence. As there were a lot of scientific unknowns during the past year, the lockdowns were overly broad as a matter of necessity--nobody knew how bad it could get. Moreover, CA's refusal to stick to the lackadaisal CDC guidelines was based heavily on the Trump administration's politicization of COVID19, and especially on the CDC's missteps at the beginning of the COVID19 crisis (i.e., when they were originally advising people not to wear masks...because they wanted to save them for medical workers and had neglected to make purchase orders for masks). Requiring masks after vaccination was required for several months because it wasn't yet known how effective vaccinations would be in the real world. Once that data was established, the mask mandate ended for the vaccinated. Also, note that the vaccinated can still get and spread COVID19, especially the newer strains like delta, they simply won't suffer severe symptoms if they do get infected. If you don't want to live in an environment like CA where science and public health plays a role in decision-making, it's probably for the best that you're not living in CA.
• renewiltord 5y ago
  I live in Austin right now after almost a decade in the Bay. It's nice and I can see why people like it: it's got more of the kind of vibe which lets you raise a family - very suburban, relatively cheap (wrt the Bay Area), people will say hi on the street, stuff like that. San Francisco is a city, though, as small as it is, in a way that Austin isn't, as big as it is. Just like London and New York City are in a different class from little SF. The heat is kind of unfortunate, but I can tell you that sitting in an air-conditioned home looking out at a sunny day beats sitting in a heated home looking out at a foggy day for me. I wish SF didn't have the fog and was all sunny all the time. The only thing is the politics, though. Texas politics, which leaks to Austin, is very top-down big-government. SF and maybe CA politics is more personal freedom. Lots more taxes and corruption in CA, as far as I can see, but definitely more personal freedom too (except in gun rights).
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • djrogers 5y ago
    > Texas politics, which leaks to Austin, is very top-down big-government. SF and maybe CA politics is more personal freedom. I don't see that at all. California is one of the hardest places in the country to run a small business. It's #1 or #2 in high taxes every year. California very restrictive and proscriptive land use laws (Rent control, permitting requirements, mandatory building laws, etc). California also has some of the strictest professional/occupational licensing laws in the country. Unless you're only focused on getting booze delivered and buying pot, almost anything you want to do is cheaper, easier, and more legal in Texas.
    • renewiltord 5y ago
      Oh, I see those as freedom, yes, but not that around my person. Yeah, there's a lot deregulated in Texas, but for personal freedom it is some seriously big government stuff. In the Bay, I can buy and consume weed or psychedelics, I can drink in the park, I can generally be naked. Texas is very big on government policing personal behaviour. They're not really about individuals having freedom around their person.
• mgarfias 5y ago
  No way in hell I will ever go back.
• muzz 5y ago
  This should have been absolutely expected. Tech giants were even buying up offices during the pandemic ostensibly in anticipation of larger workforces in the Bay Area.
  • aritraghosh007 5y ago
    Google and Facebook both expanded their real estate along the Embarcadero waterfront. On the retail side, Ikea made its first purchase for a retail store in SF. Construction hasn't taken a back seat in SF during the lock down. These stories often get hidden by the catchy headlines of who's shutting down offices and going fully remote.
    • muzz 5y ago
      Google and others also bought offices in places like Sunnyvale, north San Jose (not the downtown site but rather a separate one), etc