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What's the Best City for Techies in 2024?
- KBme 3y agoHaha not a word about social issues or crime. I wonder why.
- exabrial 3y agoprecisely. > It used to be that the best city for technologists was the Bay Area.... ...but Covid reordered the world. The Bay Area governments and surrounding State have/has essentially unlimited budgets. They have no political opponents. The actual problem is the ideas, and I wish they would stay in California where they belong.
- reducesuffering 3y agoMost of the Bay Area is safer from crime than 90% of the country, probably safer than where you are. > stay in California where they belong Out of the US biggest 100 cities, CA also has 3/7 top safest from violent crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... > The actual problem is the ideas No problem with the ideas that cause Alaska, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas to have higher violent crime rates than CA as a whole? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_violent_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
- JonChesterfield 3y agoSan Francisco coming 4th most dangerous in your table might be correlated with a reluctance to go there.
- reducesuffering 3y agoFor one, 4th is looking at property crime, not "most dangerous," where SF is #37 for violent crime. Yes, SF attracts the nexus of crime around the BART stops, but that also pulls it from most of the surrounding area, which OP was talking Bay Area as a whole. Anecdotally, I've been here 30 years and never victim of a "dangerous" crime. Fat chance you move to Mountain View to work at Google and anything happens to you. The only place in CA someone reading a "Best City for Techies" will encounter crime is Market St. and Tenderloin in SF. The rest of it in deep Oakland, Stockton, Modesto, San Bernardino, and pockets of LA, they will never end up.
- dkhenry 3y agoI am pretty sure most people who work for Google and live in the south bay could tell you stories of having their car windows smashed in, and I do mean most. I think it is about 100% of the googlers and ex-googlers I know have had that experience. Also as of two years ago, the chances that your Catalytic converter was stolen unless you parked your car in your garage was getting near 50% as well. I suppose if you limit crime to just "dangerous" maybe it comes out on top, but I would prefer to be somewhere that I don't have to worry about 50,000 of my neighbors OD'ing on the street every year.
- robertlagrant 3y agoInterestingly, this is a similar experience I have from friends from when I lived in Johannesburg. Smash and grabs and car/parts thefts were very common.
- Apocryphon 3y agoSouth Bay petty crime and homelessness has unfortunately arisen but that is a real alarmist way to speak about the most mundane stretch of suburban sprawl outside of LA County.
- astrange 3y agoAre you confusing South Bay with SF? Nothing ever happens in South Bay. Nothing good and nothing bad.
- jahewson 3y agoPay no attention to Oakland…
- kstrauser 3y agoI grew up in a small Midwest city that I thought was pretty nice and safe, but is a statistically very dangerous place to live. I knew of Oakland’s rep before I moved here, and was underwhelmed with the reality of it. I’ve never once felt as unsafe in any part of Oakland as I did at the Taco Bell on S. National in Springfield, Missouri on any given Friday night.
- hotnfresh 3y agoPeople have these ideas because “most dangerous city” lists usually mean most dangerous big cities, and leave implicit that more-rural areas are far safer. If you start analyzing and carving things up other ways, it quickly becomes clear that the “small town and small city America is safer than big city America” thing that a lot of people assume is true, isn’t. Muddled at best, and bordering on simply being backwards. This makes perfect sense when you consider that violent and property crime correlate with poverty, and small towns and cities tend to be much poorer than big cities. Add in that density effects mean that you might see more crime in a big city while in fact being safer than in a small city, and the picture starts to come together.
- astrange 3y agoRural and suburban areas are more dangerous than cities because you're in or near cars more often. That's really all that matters. In particular, NYC is by far the safest place in the country.
- rngname22 3y agoYour link uses FBI Uniform Crime Rates. Some facts about FBI UCR: 1) The FBI web site recommends against using its data for ranking because these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/caution-against-ranking https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-... 2) they are submitted voluntarily by police departments 3) many police departments don't even participate: "This year about 7,000 police agencies, covering about 35% of the U.S. population, were missing." https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/10/08/the-problem-with-the-fbi-s-missing-crime-data https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/10/08/the-problem-wi... 4) From your own Wiki link: "Often, one obtains very different results depending on whether crime rates are measured for the city jurisdiction or the metropolitan area." 5) The BJS reports that 45% of violent crimes and 36% of property crimes go unreported to police. And I don't know that we can assume the rates of not reporting crimes are consistent across metros. https://www.waldenu.edu/online-masters-programs/ms-in-criminal-justice/resource/criminal-justice-update-five-facts-about-crime-in-the-us https://www.waldenu.edu/online-masters-programs/ms-in-crimin...
- exabrial 3y ago> Most of the Bay Area is safer from crime than 90% of the country That's pretty hilarious. In the 48 hours I was there, I had a homeless exposed his dong to me, another offered to sell me cocaine, then while I was eating at a nice Thai Restaurant, a lady in her underwear smashed the front window of the restaurant with a fire extinguisher. Literally none of these things have ever happened to me anywhere else in the world in 39 years, except for the 48 hours I was in the Bay Area. Now please tell me about Selection Bias next.
- Kephael 3y agoIt's the same deal in Seattle, I don't even bother reporting this stuff to the police. Elsewhere, the police would respond and it would show in statistics.
- finite_depth 3y ago[dead]
- barryrandall 3y agoPrevailing political sentiment is an important social issue and it was addressed in the article.
- KBme 3y agoMaybe, but homelessness/poverty and education quality not, for example. These would be important for people who plan to have a family. I guess the social side can be deduced easily from the fact that these places are single-party cryptodictatorships, though.
- glafayette 3y agoDoes anybody have a theory as to why Seattle's startup ecosystem is so bad compared to all of its other metrics? I moved here a few years ago and it feels like the culture nudges people away from defining their life based on their work (compared to SF/NYC at least), but that feels like a generally handy-wavy explanation. Presumably there's enough MS + Amazon money floating around to get a decent angel/venture scene started.
- Eumenes 3y agoThe weather? Not as many solid universities compared to Bay area?
- outside1234 3y agoAlso not much capital available
- antiframe 3y agoWhat's your definition of not much? There's a lot of money sloshing around King County.
- PhoenixReborn 3y agoIt's because WA allows for non-compete agreements for employees above a certain income level, whereas CA bans non-competes outright. So it's much more difficult to get top/high-ranking people to leave MS/AMZN since they might get sued by their employer. Note that the threshold in WA is around $116K annual salary and I imagine that most senior tech employees would be above this level. Source: https://foley.com/insights/publications/2023/01/non-competes-new-year-higher-income-thresholds/ https://foley.com/insights/publications/2023/01/non-competes...
- VirusNewbie 3y agoWoah. What is the standard non compete for a software engineer? Do most Amazon employees risk being sued if they leave for google or microsoft?
- okdood64 3y agoHow many of those Seattle roles are for Amazon and Microsoft? What's missing here when selecting the "Best City" is what sort of variety is there in the market? Surely you don't want to feel as if you have to stay at a company just because there aren't many other options in your area. In the last table there needs to be a line item for: # of Unicorn Companies, or # of Publicly Traded Tech Companies.
- adamredwoods 3y agoOr repeated roles that are used as "nets" to catch as many applicants as possible.
- gsaines 3y agoYeah, I actually considered including that, but the answer is super obvious: the Bay Area trounces every other place. I responded to a comment above about this, but I don't want to come off as a Seattle booster or Bay Area basher. I live in Austin and think my own analysis makes the city seem better than it is. We lived in the Bay for 7 years and both my wife and I agree that if we hadn't wanted to raise kids near our parents (a value we agreed on way before having our first), we would definitely have stayed in CA. So many cool people and interesting roles.
- okdood64 3y agoWould be worth then changing the title to “The Best City For Techies for me” then. The way it is now implies you intended to be objective about it.
- bdcravens 3y agoAny city with a good Internet connection.
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- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- Descon 3y agoAny similar breakdowns for Canadian cities?
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- VirusNewbie 3y agoI like this article but there are a few things worth mentioning: Total job postings can be wildly inaccurate. I know for example, Google will post a job opening, but you have no idea how many teams are actually hiring. It's much more likely you'll see one or two job openings in LA and the Bay Area, but the latter will have five times as many teams that are actually hiring. Second is the fact that office flexibility matters a lot. Having to be in an office in Santa Monica 5 days a week is going to drastically impact your lifestyle compared to say, 2 days a week, in which you could live in a much less expensive place. I live in Orange County and while housing is not cheap, what you can get for 2 million bucks would likely cost 4 million in the bay area.
- gsaines 3y agoThanks for the suggestion. I'm curious about the job data as well. I mentioned this further up in the thread, but when I moved from the Bay to Austin back in 2020, I did some searches for software engineering, UX, and PM roles and what I found was a lot more skewed. IE, Austin had massively fewer roles (if I recall, 5%) compared to the Bay. But, when I ran this analysis, the differences were much less pronounced. Do you know of any way to correct for this bias? Clearly searching on public job boards doesn't appear to be getting at the reality.
- jedberg 3y agoThis is clearly written with the starting premise "How do I show that the Bay Area is no longer the best place". You can see the biases throughout the piece. For example, the chart with the top tax rates. Yes it's technically true that the top rate in California is 13.3% for incomes over $1M. But then they used that tax rate against the "tax adjusted income" but the income was only $300K. They also have subjective measures that unsurprisingly put the Bay Area lower on the list. I'm not saying the Bay Area is the best, but I'm saying this analysis is flawed and biased.
- CSMastermind 3y agoYeah agreed, it seems clear the author started with the conclusion and worked backwards to figure out how to use data to get them there. I don't even have a strong opinion about the best city but when you see that style of writing a few times you kind of learn to spot it.
- jwells89 3y agoIt also doesn’t seem to factor in property taxes which can change the equation significantly for those looking to own rather than rent.
- gsaines 3y agoAh, shoot, I didn't mean to give that impression! I'm actually a big fan of the bay area and lived there for 7 years. I live in Austin now and think that the analysis made Austin appear too good. I need to dig deeper into why the job stats were so similar across cities because that doesn't pass sanity check for me.
- Apocryphon 3y agoSeems like an oversight to disinclude Chicago, Raleigh (Research Triangle), and Salt Lake City.
- hexadec 3y agoIt is a deliberate oversight, the author picked metrics and test based on the result not the other way around. Even the first test (# of jobs per location) should be adjusted to jobs per population or something else since most people value diversity in their social circles.
- ydkme 3y agoHilarious to state that Seattle wins over Austin in the weather and politics categories. And completely ignores crime rates.
- adamredwoods 3y agoAnd diversity and culture!
- gsaines 3y agoI happen to agree: I like Austin's weather better than Seattle, but everyone I talk to disagrees with me. Don't get me wrong, I have no love of the 40+ consecutive days of 100+ heat, but overall, I'd take it over the darkness and cold of the Seattle area. I didn't include crime rates just because unless they are super high, they don't really factor too much into the financial calculus of living in either place.
- adamredwoods 3y agoWhen I lived in the Bay Area, it was a ball of stress to "keep up" the salary to be able to enjoy anything, as I wasn't being paid those "top salaries" everyone uses in their data summaries. I couldn't ever purchase a home, and these were important things to my lifestyle. I moved to Seattle and now I'm seeing these obscene pricing trends happening here (and with the worse weather, too, sigh). I think the best city is the one where you find a sense of belonging and contentness. Data doesn't cover all the nuances of happiness.
- carabiner 3y agoSeattle is as expensive as NYC except everything closes at 9 and it has 1/100th vibrancy. It's basically San Jose North.
- lobsterslive 3y agoSeattle has better sushi though.
- jedberg 3y agoThe west has better sushi than the east in general, but SF still beats Seattle for sushi.
- carabiner 3y agoCalifornia, really LA, has the best Asian food in the country. Seattle's food scene is, for lack of a better term, white.
- jedberg 3y agoI will agree that for the most part LA has SF beat on Asian food, but Cantonese/HK style Chinese is better in SF, and the rest is probably on par, just fewer options in SF. But you nailed in on the head -- you have to find ethnic food made by people who know how it's supposed to taste and making it for people who know how it's supposed to taste. If I go into an ethnic restaurant I know it's good if the majority of the customers are that ethnicity.
- ben7799 3y agoThis has zero mention of the quality of work. If you don't want to work for MS or Amazon Seattle probably doesn't look as good. Hardly scientific but I tend to think each city seems to have attracted different kinds of companies, and not all of us are as interested in working for some types of companies as others. Personally I'd rather avoid anything to do with social media, advertising, online shopping, etc.. Health insurance SWE jobs would also not be at the top of my list. I do wonder if this matters less if you're a PM, as the author is, and whether the fact he's a PM changes his calculation as much. I think if I was a PM company culture and how demanding customers were might be a big factor. PMs seem to be in short supply even compared to engineers and the pay figures he's citing might reflect that. A lot of places I've worked PM has seemed to be enough of a disaster people don't want to do it. And that's even with it seemingly being easier to move from engineer -> PM than the other way around.
- gsaines 3y agoSuper valid criticism, but how to incorporate it in a quantitative way? I happen to agree with you about the quality of jobs and the ecosystem as a whole being far superior in the Bay. I had expected CA to soundly defeat all other cities by a wide margin, but either due to remote work or some other weirdness in the data collection, that didn't turn out to be the case. Maybe glass door reviews? Another commenter suggested # of Unicorns?
- ben7799 3y agoI have this weird view/feeling that the Bay area opportunities have steadily shifted towards all the negative stuff over the past 20 years. It's obviously not the whole picture but it tarnishes the reputation. It's like everything "bad" about tech has seemed to grow out of SV, as if it's become the place for grifty companies to find tech workers who don't care about what they're working on as long as it makes money. You maybe could have quantified things like how far away workers typically have to live from the office, how bad traffic is in these cities, etc.. Traffic figures are often available in terms of "hours wasted annually". It seems most of these cities are "horrible" on things like traffic though.
- dkhenry 3y agoI would argue the best city for tech has never been the bay area. Its the best place to make a lot of money in tech, but by far the best engineers I have met, and the ones who have the happiest most well adjusted lifes do not, and never have lived in the bay area. Seattle is somewhat similar, for new transplants, but there is a historical core that had a great quality of life previously. If you are starting a company today and want the top decile of talent, you will mostly find them looking for remote roles. You will find some great workers who live in the big cities, and still want the in office experience, but by far the best people are living remotely.
- ecshafer 3y agoI am not understanding how they get -88% from $300k to $160k, thats less than a 50% drop. Its also a bit presumptuous that seattle wins on “politics”. The author is generalizing based on their own preferences, i am sure plenty choose miamia or texas for the exact opposite reason.
- gsaines 3y agoYeah, geez, thanks for pointing that out! I'm not sure how that error slipped in there. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll fix it. I need an editor for these in-depth analyses. I always end up making at least 1 typo somewhere.
- attah_ 3y agoWhat is it with people and not understanding percentages? "How Much Less Do Techies Get Paid Outside the Bay?" "SF Bay Area 100%" "Miami -88%" So people in Miami are paying to work? And even if it was meant to be relative to a baseline (which is not what it says!); i have a very hard time believing that they get only 12% the pay in Miami compared to SF.
- attah_ 3y ago1-(300/160) comes out correct if rounded. I.e. 300 is 188% of 160, therefore you are making 88% less. That's not how percentages work! Wow. Just wow. Is there really a mistake this big here?
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> Wow. Just wow. Is there really a mistake this big here? Yup TFA is misleading and arguably plain incorrect. If you make $200K in L.A. and $300K in SV, you need to use seriously creative math to deduce that: "How Much Less Do Techies Get Paid Outside the Bay? -50%". Literally TFA says you're paid "minus 50% less". Negatives (in both sentences and numbers) are a bitch, especially when there are two negatives or more. TFA should say "How much more would you get paid by moving to The Bay?" and not use negative percentage. (raw median) "How much more would a L.A. dev ($200K) make by moving to The Bay ($300K)? 50% more" That'd be clearer.
- attah_ 3y agoThe fault goes deeper; they say X percent less counted in percentage points of the compared thing and not the baseline. If you then have multiple rows, the uselessness becomes evident. Is it some cultural or linguistical thing where it always has to be X amount more or less and never "Y% of"?
- gsaines 3y agoYeah, this was completely my bad. Any chance you'd like to proof future posts for stupid mistakes like this? :P I joke, but I'm writing 2-4k words per week, and the sheer number of simple arithmetic calculations makes it tough to catch even big mistakes. Seriously, though, if you know of a way to proof posts (services, forums, etc), I'd be interested. What I need is an editor as a service. The blog is just a hobby, so I can't afford a real professional editor.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- carabiner 3y agoI live in Seattle and the article shows a pretty arbitrary list of criteria, half of which have nothing to do with tech. Outdoor recreation is great but what about decent bars, dating scene, food, startups, tech meetups, university public events in tech? How easy is it to find a roommate, do you need a car and so on. Some of the criteria would also make more sense on a per capita basis.
- davydog187 3y agoSeems like they’re not accounting for Fintech in NYC, some of which is private e.g. Bloomberg
- Ladyady 3y agoClicked through wondering if Bristol, UK, or Talinn, Estonia might make an appearance, but I guess the author missed a word from the title.
- paxys 3y agoJudgements based on lifestyle, value for money, politics or any other similar factors are obviously going to be very subjective, but it is absurd to make the argument that anywhere outside of the Bay Area is better for starting or growing your tech career. Silicon Valley is still where all the top tech companies of every size and scale are hiring, it's where all the top talent is concentrated, it's where the majority of startups are popping up, it's where all the VCs are, it's where most of the tech networking happens. There is a reason OpenAI and Anthropic are only hiring in-office in San Francisco.
- workfromspace 3y agoTLDR: USA only, not "the world". > But Covid reordered the world. Combined with friendly inquiries, I wanted to re-examine what the best city for techies is in the brave new world of more remote and hybrid work.