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Tech Hubs Are Losing the Talent War to Everywhere Else
- vwoolf 3y agoUntil "everywhere else" bans non-competes, like California does, California is unlikely to lose its position as the leader site and state for innovation: https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/18/silicon-valley-keeps-winning-because-non-competes-limit-innovation/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/18/silicon-valley-keeps-winni..., despite California's many policy missteps from housing restrictions to failure to enforce basic law and order.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoSuch an own goal by Washington and New York leaders to not get rid of non competes. They were both millimeters away.
- aetimmes 3y agoThe financial sector in NY was never going to let a non-compete ban happen.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoIt came down to one person’s signature. If the industry had that much control, it would have stalled in the legislature. Seems pretty risky to let it come down to one person. Edit: If anything, the big tech companies did a better job in Washington by allowing the non compete ban to pass for only jobs under $100k per year salaries. That way, political support is neutered in the future for any broad non compete ban that would actually affect them. For context, the legal minimum annual salary in Washington will be $90k in a few years.
- Spooky23 3y agoNew York is 1990s Indiana with NYC attached. Industrial powerhouses like Syracuse, Buffalo, etc are rust belt territory now. With the export of American industry and the consolidation of all things agriculture, the solvency of the entirety of the state budget is almost entirely dependent it just on financial services, but specifically on income tax on Wall St bonuses. No sane governor would sign that bill. The death spiral of agriculture in particular is incredible. Through incredibly incompetent policy decisions, entire regions of rural America are country ghettos, with our food supply dependent on a depleted aquifer in the Midwest and the fickle Colorado River.
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- iancmceachern 3y ago100% this The culture this has created and kept going over the last decades is exactly why. It's not because the laws anymore, it's because the change in the law so many years ago changed the culture, changed the attitude about what was "right" Andover the needle towards favoring innovation and employee talent maximization over their career rather than focus on the profits of individual companies or the output of the company. Its so worker focused, worker aligned - and in an industry that relies heavily on thought leadership type work, that is a very attractive work environment for those types of people.
- firesteelrain 3y agoBeen in Tech for 20 years and never encountered a non compete clause
- toomuchtodo 3y agoI had one for the first time in 20+ years for my last gig out of a Midwest state. Said I wouldn’t take the job if it was forced. They folded.
- sidlls 3y agoThere were non-compete clauses in every employment contract I saw when I started my software career (east coast circa 2005). Companies even tried to weasel them into the independent work contracts they signed with me when I did independent contracting for a while.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoAs someone who's been in tech in Texas for nearly 25 years, I've always had to sign a non-compete as a full time employee. It's all state/locale dependent.
- photonbeam 3y agoBanks have asked me for one, when all the job is writing internal tools, no deep trading secrets
- echelon 3y agoProbably easier to apply across the board instead of on a per-role basis.
- pengaru 3y agoIt's not just the non-competes though. California explicitly protects ownership of inventions made on your own time/equipment[0]. AFAIK other states tend to default to employer ownership of inventions. This alone is a huge win for Cali when it comes to HN/maker type folks... [0] https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2010/lab/2870-2872.html https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2010/lab/2870-2872.h...
- vajrabum 3y agoHousing in San Francisco, the Penninsula and Silicon Valley is constrained by the fact that it's rich, already built out and there isn't anywhere else to expand to at the edge of town because of water or hills. People commute from outlying areas such as Tracy and Modesto where there's been massive construction of housing over the last 30 years.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> there isn't anywhere else to expand to at the edge of town because of water or hills San Francisco has massive infill potential [1]. Its limited, expensive housing is a policy choice. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jake-Wegmann/publication/254397240_Yes_in_My_Backyard_Mobilizing_the_Market_for_Secondary_Units/links/5c4cd457a6fdccd6b5cc2362/Yes-in-My-Backyard-Mobilizing-the-Market-for-Secondary-Units.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jake-Wegmann/publicatio...
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- bobthepanda 3y agoNew York is rich and yet can still build up. Bay Area NIMBYs are just next level.
- photonbeam 3y agoThat’s because of the giant amounts of land to the east of 280 that you’re not allow to build on Convenient for existing land owners..
- kccqzy 3y agoAlready built out land should be made denser. I don't want the area to be expanded; that will make the area worse for walkability and bikeability; I don't want to see super commuters commuting from Tracy or Modesto because that's so much pollution, congestion, and misery; I also don't want to see the area's abundance of large open space disappear. We should instead make the current built land denser by strongly encouraging existing single-family homes to have ADUs or be converted into duplexes and fourplexes. We should require all new residential construction to be multi-family units meeting density standards. We should set minimum height rules for new residential buildings to encourage vertical use of space.
- sspiff 3y agoI live in a European country, and while non-competes are legal, if a company chooses to exercise them, they are also forced to continue to pay you for the duration, and you can still take a non-competing job in the mean time. Non-competes are also judged rather narrowly: they can't ban you from working for any tech company, they need to operate in the same space as the one you worked in before.
- Racing0461 3y agoUntil i see the data suggesting what the article is saying, i'll assume it's just some journalist intern trying to hit their article quote by taking a 1 sentence they saw on linkedin and blew it up to a full article.
- blowski 3y agoIndeed, it is a tragedy that the WSJ now has that level of credibility.
- jeremyjh 3y agoChristopher Mims has been writing at the WSJ since 2014.
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- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Until i see the data What do you think the “percentage change in the largest 100 metro areas’ share of digital services jobs, from 2020 to 2022” may is?
- lotsofpulp 3y agoIrrelevant data? I am sure that includes phone tech support jobs. Payrates/change in quantity of jobs at certain pay deciles/quintiles would be helpful.
- Racing0461 3y ago> from 2020 to 2022 so the largest growth of remote jobs were only included in the data? what about the last year that had the largest tech layoff in 2 decades and RTO mandate? Looks like i was right after all.
- api 3y agoHousing prices, of course. It turns out that refusing to build housing to meet demand has serious consequences: homelessness, street crime and filth due to homelessness, inability to hire for any but the highest paid jobs, families leaving because you can’t raise kids, and being passed over for other areas by new talent among others. I saw a national map recently of places likely to lose congressional representation over the next 5-10 years vs places that will gain. It was almost perfectly a map of places where you can’t build housing vs places where you can.
- toenail 3y ago> It turns out that refusing to build housing Refuses to build? If there is demand and nobody builds the market sounds broken.
- api 3y agoIn most of these places it’s basically illegal. Housing is run as a cartel to benefit existing homeowners and landlords.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoDon’t underestimate the gullible economically illiterate who undergird the support for anti-development policies. Without them, the NIMBY bloc wouldn’t have staying power.
- sidlls 3y ago"Temporarily embarrassed millionaire"[1] describes this mindset. It is quite prevalent in America's poor. I've seen too many poor Americans exhibit this mentality to not believe it is more or less a truism at this point. The propaganda of the wealthy and connected in this country has been remarkably effective. [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed
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- pj_mukh 3y agoThe press loves a clear winners and losers story. The reality is more complicated. Tech was never zero sum and it turns out the tech population within the Bay Area is growing again [1], while other metro areas also see tech growth. The only real zero sum game here remains real-estate, the bulk of the people missing out from all this growth are lower middle class non-tech workers getting pushed out of metro cities. [1] https://fortune.com/2023/12/20/san-francisco-population-rises/amp/ https://fortune.com/2023/12/20/san-francisco-population-rise...
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> press loves a clear winners and losers story The article directly addresses this: “A lot of tech innovation still happens in places like the Bay Area—witness the highly concentrated boom of new artificial-intelligence companies there. But as the tech industry as a whole has matured, it is following the pattern of every previous industrial revolution: knowledge, capital and talent is spreading out, across America and the world.”
- pj_mukh 3y agoHeadline literally has the word “losing” in it. Hehe. But because the data doesn’t bear that out gotta hedge bets in the article, as long as you’ve got the clicks.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Headline literally has the word “losing” in it Losing market share threatens “hub” status. That doesn’t mean everyone is miserable. But there is a real story in the data someone who reads the article will glean. > as long as you’ve got the clicks The Journal makes money on subscriptions. You’re describing publications that cater to people who don’t pay for news and don’t read articles.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoWSJ, like pretty much all media, earns money from both ads and subscriptions. They have ads in the middle of Apple News+ too. And I assume they get paid somehow for “submarine” or PR articles. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThe SF policy is 'We are full, go away'
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoI don't think it's equivalent to say, because tech is growing, percentage-wise, elsewhere, that tech hubs are "losing the talent war." I've never worked in the Bay area except for a short stint a while back, but these articles seem to always pop up every couple years, and they're always wrong. All of the top companies and startups have always come from a very small set of cities - the ecosystem effects are just too strong. Look at the latest big boom in tech, in AI. The "centers of the universe" for AI are still pretty much the same usual suspects.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> don't think it's equivalent to say, because tech is growing, percentage-wise, elsewhere, that tech hubs are "losing the talent war." Losing market share is losing the recruitment war for a hub. It doesn’t mean everyone will be miserable. But by definition, market share is what defines a hub.
- spaniard89277 3y agoSillicon Valley pulls you in because the amazing career opportunities you have there, and pushes you out because of the insane land/housing situation, and how everyone around you who's not IT is miserable. It's "funny" to see how many places that deem themselves a progressive yet they fail so hard to tackle the very basics of poverty. Living in a place where I can get 200k as a white collar while many others have to live in tents because despite being workers can't afford more, it's my idea of dystopia. An average blue collar should be able to afford rent or buy a small place. If that's not possible in the place you live in, then you're living in a dystopian place.
- lukasb 3y agoAs someone who has lived in SF for 13 years and loves it, 100% agree. So much preventable human misery here.
- sroussey 3y agoSF spends $100k per homeless person per year. Preventable is easier said than done, unfortunately.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoSF literally has a homeless industrial complex. There's a network of non-profits that siphons billions of tax payer dollars to "fix homelessness". If they really cared about preventing homelessness, they would pass rent control legislation. Every other western nation has figured this out, if you provide basic (and relatively cheap) safety nets around housing, you don't have thousands new homeless people a year. Instead they choose to waste taxpayer money to buy London Breed's donors another house in Sonoma
- fragmede 3y agoBroad rent control protections were passed in San Francisco in 1979, and statewide in 2019, and has lead to more misery over housing by slumlords than if there was no rent control. Landlords have zero incentive to improve their properties, so the number of people I know that are living in cheap, but substandard apartments (eg heating is non-functional) is too many. And even if you get rent control so you can continue on affording rent, if the burrito place charges $8 which then increases to $12 with inflation, the budget you have that's counting on $4 burrito means you still have to move away.
- greatNespresso 3y agoLink from Brookings, on which the WSJ article seems to based on: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tech-jobs-are-finally-spreading-out-spurred-by-private-investment-and-federal-initiatives/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tech-jobs-are-finally-spr... comes without paywall
- bogota 3y agoI mean this is just talking about the US but looking at job postings for any large company over half are bow for people not in the US.
- squigz 3y agoEverything is framed as a "war"...
- sidlls 3y agoI doubt the headline. The type of person attracted to live in the “inexpensive” cultural wasteland of the Midwest or the regressive, racist south is on average less talented than my peers in urban tech centers like the Bay Area. There might be a loss in the “low cost, (relatively) lower skill” sector of the market.
- silexia 3y agoRetitle this article to "Uber liberal cities invite massive crime, people with options now leaving"
- greenyoda 3y agohttps://archive.ph/e5SUY https://archive.ph/e5SUY
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"As the tech industry grows up, talent and funding are spreading out. That's bolstering smaller cities all across the country. Tech hubs like San Francisco are seeing their share of U.S. tech workers shrink. Photo: Shelby Knowles for The Wall Street Journal Silicon Valley and other tech hubs are losing the tech talent war. Metro areas that consistently attracted huge numbers of tech workers have hit a turning point, according to fresh data from labor-market analytics firm Lightcast, crunched by D.C. think tank Brookings. The share of the nation's tech workers who work in places such as Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Boston, New York, Los Angeles and the greater Washington, D.C. area is actually shrinking."