Current Reno resident who has also lived in Silicon Valley and San Fransisco reporting in. Born and raised in Reno. Also have spent a significant amount of time in Austin.<p>Out of all 4 of those places, Reno is by far the most fun. Between the skiing, hiking and awesome bars the quality of life in Reno is unparalleled. We have a ton of amazing local bands. A burning man party is one of the craziest parties you will ever attend. The weather can be harsh compared to California, but I personally love it. It's hard for me to imagine living anywhere else.<p>Austin is fun, but is a swamp and overcrowded. San Francisco is also fun, but is incredibly overcrowded and expensive. SV is kind of boring, and too family-oriented for a young person.<p>The only problem in Reno is the job market. I know a lot of talented IT pros who have trouble finding a good job. Reno's economy is dominated by Casinos and Finance. Almost all of the talented programmer I know from Reno have wound up in SV or San Francisco. UNR isn't producing enough people trained in IT fields. The tech job market is anemic. Nepotism and the "Good Old Boys Club" run deep in the Reno economy. Nevada is much more corrupt than most states.<p>Reno will never be the next Silicon Valley or even the next Austin. We simply don't have an educational system to support it. The Bay-Area and Los Angeles are a huge brain drain on the Reno area. I think Bloomberg hit the nail on the head with deeming it "Silicon Valley's Back Office". Reno's place is a great place to do manufacturing and run data centers because of it's location and lower cost of doing business.<p>I will probably be moving to another city soon because I simply can't find a good job or enough work freelancing in my field (Front-End Web Development). Reno is my favorite place to live, but it's hard to take a ~50% pay cut to live here.
There's tech companies planning to add a little hope for Vegas and Reno alike with datacenters being opened up in the area due to the super low costs while still maintaining some general proximity to southern California.<p>Unfortunately, all these announcements of companies opening up datacenters in random, low-cost areas of the US such as North Carolina seem to imply that these will bring the same sort of tech jobs as Silicon Valley in some way when this is pretty unlikely to actually add permanent jobs that are much more than commodity McDonalds-level employment. Modern datacenters are basically fancy warehouses and are engineered for maximum autonomous operation (I think we have robots that can rack & stack 1U and 2U boxes now actually depending upon server vendor). These places are typically being constructed by people barely making more than minimum wage and can barely spell Cisco, and they're not going to be the ones actually running anything either except occasionally fixing up shoddy work that probably doesn't even meet the really relaxed electrical and commercial building codes.<p>But once these DCs are up and the cables installed, they're managed pretty much remotely as a rule and the jobs of racking and stacking are fast disappearing. Sometimes your network guy has to drive out to the DC, sometimes people engineer around entire racks failing due to a PDU going down, anything to avoid putting a higher-paid engineer on the ground there. There's almost no Fortune 500 I know of that has a datacenter that isn't trying to decommission most of theirs, so while each DC being raised up is theoretically more jobs in disadvantaged areas, this comes at the cost oftentimes of losing 2-3 more datacenters with 2-3 times more jobs in slightly higher costs of living areas like Missouri, southern Virginia, Michigan, and Indiana.
Reno is an awesome town. Most of the people I've talked to who have been to Reno have only ever seen the "trashy" casinos and run-down areas along S Virginia St., but if you dig deeper you'll find there's much more depth. They have an up and coming art scene, some great restaurants and bars, and perhaps most importantly a population of passionate and extremely friendly people who absolutely love their town and want it to succeed. Go Reno!
I graduated from UNR in Computer Science and had the good fortune of finding a great job in Reno. Rent is incredibly cheap, the average commute time to get anywhere is 15 minutes (I80 and US395 intersect the city), there's no income tax, there's every type of recreation you could want within a 45 minute drive... I could go on. Downtown can still appear pretty trashy, like the article states. I suppose that's the nature of having big casinos there, but I hope it is able to clean itself up.<p>I could sing Reno's praises all day, and I count myself very lucky that I was able to find a good job here. I have incredibly high hopes for the future of this city, a lot of great things are happening!
In 2001 I built a data center in Reno thinking it was inevitably going to see an economic boom. Well, to be more specific, I purchased a half-completed data center abandoned by Adelphia after they went bust and completed it. Long story short, I lost my shirt and sold it two years later. I've lived in Reno on-and-off ever since, including a three year stint in the Bay Area startup scene. I'm still waiting for that economic boom. I've also lived in the Sacramento area and seen similar economic issues to Reno, only on a larger scale. If Sacramento can't make the proximity to the Bay Area work -- there's little hope for Reno. Hope I'm wrong about that.
Well, Reno already is home to Apple's tax dodg^W^Winvestment subdivision, Braeburn Capital. So, more companies coming in to having to pay decent wages only makes sense.
It's interesting to see how many places in the world are trying to bring about their own Startup Row esque thing. Interesting to see where it will flourish.