Silicon Valley has a confluence of things many other areas do <i>not</i> have.<p>1. <i>Several</i> high class feeder schools in the area including but not limited to Stanford and UC Berkeley. Note the feeder schools have robust CS programs but also renowned business and law schools.<p>2. A robust banking sector in San Francisco (for access to Old Money).<p>3. A bunch of New Money investors (Sand Hill Road gang etc) that you can wine and dine in-person.<p>4. California has a ton of high tech businesses besides just plucky Web startups.<p>A lot of supposed Silicon * regions have one or two of these things but rarely all within a two hour plane ride of each other (if not closer). Austin is nice and all but Silicon Valley (the nine-county Bay Area) is a megaregion with a population of over 7 million people with another two million in the combined statistical area. It's got twice the population of the San Antonio and Austin MSAs combined. That just makes for a much larger pool of we-don't-need-to-relocate employees for start ups or new efforts for existing companies.<p>It sucks Silicon Valley is so damned expensive but some other regions just being cheaper isn't going to pull away many startups. Despite bitching about taxes companies <i>really</i> like the fact non-competes are basically void in California. They incorporate and "headquarter" in tax havens anyways.
The article contradicts its hypey headline:<p><i>To be sure, the Bay Area has such a deep reservoir of tech talent, money and infrastructure, not to mention the climate and the ocean, that it won’t be easily knocked off its perch.</i>
I feel like someone smarter than me is going to point this out. But was this monopoly ever a reality? ie Microsoft, Amazon etc. Maybe the article gets into that too.<p>Regardless I like that the article represents a possible shift in public narrative. Even though I question the moral reasoning and long-term sustainability of shifts like this occurring with a (if not the) dominant motivation being tax avoision.
Is there meaningful, comprehensive data on anything like "What cities are focal points for technology work"? For example, number of software engineers, total software workforce compensation, number of funded startups, etc?<p>Edit: As a poor proxy, checking the most recent 200 levels.fyi entries for ", CA |" finds 37 entries when I checked, vs 12 for TX. Wikipedia says the San Francisco CSA has 9 million people, vs 2.2 million for the Austin MSA. There's <i>lots</i> of issues with that analysis (first, I think CA programmers are more concentrated than TX programmers), but to my surprise, it implies the the bay has more programmers, but Austin has more programmers per capita?<p>Do people have suggestions for better data, or better analyses of data?<p><a href="https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer" rel="nofollow">https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer</a>
I think it’s equally fair to ask if the future is more distributed in nature. Yes, maybe Austin becomes more of a concentrated home of tech than it was before, but haven’t we seen it proven out over the last two years that companies can be successful working apart, hiring the best folks they can find regardless of location (many of who would prefer to stay in low COL locations?)<p>Regardless of your personal ideology on the topic, there are too many benefits for all parties involved to ignore remote work as a lasting trend.
Marge Simpson: Sweetie, you could still go to McGill, the Harvard of Canada.<p>Lisa Simpson: Anything that's the "something" of the "something" isn't really the "anything" of "anything".<p>I'm hesitant to say things won't change because folks who say that are usually wrong, but if I <i>had</i> to put money on it, I wouldn't put more than $1k (1:1) that by 2027 tech company capital deployed net 2022 is higher in Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown MSA than in the SF Bay Area.
cmd-f "Non-compete" then "compete." <a href="https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/2/13/14580874/google-self-driving-noncompetes" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/2/13/14580874/google-self...</a><p>Until Texas, or Washington State, or other relevant jurisdictions ban non-competes, California will continue to have a key edge, despite its varieties of political and social dysfunction.
There’s no perfect city, so obviously there will be multiple major tech hubs in the US with different tradeoffs. As someone who has spent the winter in Austin to escape the cold of the North, it’s clear to me that Austin will continue to grow into one of these hubs. Will it surpass SF? Maybe, maybe not. However, I definitely see it becoming a major player on roughly the same level as other US hubs like SF, NY, and Chicago.
IMO, fully distributed companies are the future so all these 'hubs' are on a downslope. It is harder to quantify though so I expect headlines to keep toting some particular city or another.
Say what you will, Austin is still in Texas. It’s very hot, dodgy infrastructure and probably not a good place to raise daughters. But yeah, if you’re in it for the bucks, go for it.<p>I’ve lived all over n America and I can’t see it. It would beat “no other alternative” but that’s about it.
My understanding is that a major reason why the Bay Area became the tech hub it did is because of academic institutions like Stanford and Berkeley, which in turn led to commercial enterprises like HP, Shockley, and Fairchild. From there, it was like dandelion seeds in the wind, with alumni from those companies going on to found AMD, Kleiner Perkins, Xerox PARC, etc.<p>It seems to me that, until UT Austin catches up with Stanford and Berkeley in its ability to churn out tech talent, we can apply Betteridge's law of headlines here (i.e. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.").<p>If anything, the biggest threat to Silicon Valley's dominance seems to be the post-COVID trend of remote-friendly tech employers. That has already benefited Austin, but not exclusively so.<p>EDIT: Xerox PARC apparently shouldn't be included in that list. Its founders were Jack Goldman and George Pake, neither of whom were alumni of the companies or universities I mentioned.
Almost always the answer to a question in a headline is No (Betteridge's law of headlines). I think there is a lot of wishful thinking about breaking SV's dominance. Reasons being that it is such a HCOL area and how great would it be to live elsewhere! Truth be told, high tech salaries are not as high in other regions compared to the COL (in the general sense). SV has at least two top engineering schools (UCB and Stanford), and many people are unwilling to give up the easy opportunity to switch jobs and _not_ move.<p>There is also this gravity effect of SV. People move to SV to get a tech job, so thats where the majority of them are. But from talking to folks, there is a real lack of available talent, so companies are forced to look elsewhere. From my own experience, there are not a huge number of available candidates in other areas either.