Silicon Valley job seekers are increasingly looking for work elsewhere

I interviewed out in San Francisco right out of college, and was struck by how strongly I did not want to move there. The primary drivers were cost - unsurprising - but also attitude. I don&#x27;t buy into a lot of the SV culture, I don&#x27;t find it encouraging, and I wasn&#x27;t really willing to tolerate it just to work for a slightly cooler or higher-paying company than the ones I could find in the Midwest.<p>I guess I can&#x27;t blame SV for that - I am just clearly not a fit for it - but I can&#x27;t help but wonder whether there are people out there now who are more like me than they realize, and might be happier elsewehere (or would go elsewhere if they reasonably thought they could).

Couldn&#x27;t dig up more recent data[0], but tech job growth in absolute numbers, from 2014 -&gt; 2015:<p>San Francisco: +21% 59,600 -&gt; 72,200<p>Silicon Valley: +7.2% 229,200 -&gt; 245,800<p>Oakland&#x2F;East-Bay: +11.8% 50,600 -&gt;56,600<p>SF Mid-Peninsula: +5.0% 45,600 -&gt; 47,900<p>Boston: +3.1% 149,700 -&gt; 156,000<p>Austin: +7.8% 74,400 -&gt; 80,200<p>[0] page 4: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.us.jll.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;Research&#x2F;US-Tech-Employment-Trends-2016-JLL.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.us.jll.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;Research&#x2F;US-Tech-E...</a><p>Edit: Added Mid-Peninsula and East Bay to complete SF Bay Area. Total Bay Area Tech Jobs in 2015: 444,500<p>Edit 2: Corrected typo, as pointed out, my bad. SF 72,200

I&#x27;m still a big fan of &quot;work in Silicon Valley for 1-4 years, once&quot;, but there isn&#x27;t a day I wake up in the Seattle area not happy to have moved.

This should be retitled &quot;Silicon Valley job seekers are increasingly willing to consider working elsewhere.&quot;<p>There is no data in this post about where people actually end up working. Given job growth in the major tech hubs, it is implausible and&#x2F;or mathematically unlikely that SF is no longer as attractive to job seekers as places like Austin. Nothing against Austin, but the tech industry there is still an order of magnitude smaller than SF, and the gap is not shrinking.

Some reasons why you may want to move out of San Francisco:<p>- You want to live around real people and not around people who talk to computers all day, while making up stories about real people in their mind.<p>- You don&#x27;t think that waiting for an hour to get into a restaurant is a good way to spend your one hour off work.<p>- You want a yard.<p>- You&#x27;re tired of people constantly being offended by everything.<p>- You like commitment and people who can make up their mind.

What I tell folk about NYC is that unlike SF, we techies can&#x27;t be blamed for ruining the city.<p>Finance folk got in first and have ruined New York about a dozen times at this point. There&#x27;s relatively little left to ruin.

Hard to ask someone to sell their house, move their employed spouse and children to the most expensive patch of land in the country and also hire-fast-fire-fast. Seems like moving to the Bay optimizes for people with no relationships or dependents, generally keeping the age range pretty low. Not saying it should change, SV can&#x27;t be everything for everybody, but that&#x27;s the current state.

Having visited Austin, I almost feel like a huge amount of the population is made of transplants, whether tech or not. Plenty of UT students, as well. That could explain lack of outbound searches, since many of the techies only recently moved to there.

I don&#x27;t know anyone in the Bay Area that uses Indeed for Job Search. So this survey may be a little skewed

Perhaps worth noting that Indeed is based in Austin and may have a bias.

What&#x27;s really interesting is comparing the outbound job search percentages of various cities. I&#x27;m surprised SF&#x2F;SJ were at 44% versus only 2% for NYC and Seattle.<p>I have no idea how real estate can maintain its value, clearly a lot of people are considering moving.<p>BTW, The data in this article could have been presented a lot more effectively.

There may be a skew in the data on the pure basis of &quot;who&#x27;s using Indeed for their job hunt&quot;.<p>For example – it&#x27;s not a popular job-search platform amongst SF startups, as far as I&#x27;m aware.<p>(I personally still buy the overall conclusion, fwiw).

I&#x27;m actually looking forward to the day when the outflux of workers balances out the influx. As it is right now, influx &gt; outflux, so the population in SV is still growing which actually contributes to the housing crisis. Because the difference, or the growth of population is greater than the growth of housing. Influx - Outflux &gt; Housing Growth.<p>Once outflux &gt; influx, we might actually see some sanity to housing prices.

Could this also be because a huge %age of these job seekers are high skilled immigrants and they are unable to secure work visas in time?

Also, has anyone noticed that the HN &quot;Who is hiring?&quot; threads are predominantly from outside of SV, these days?

This reminds me of the old Yogi Berra quip &quot;Nobody goes there anymore, it&#x27;s too crowded.&quot;

Ive noticed since moving to SF that it seems that complaining about the city is one of the city&#x27;s favorite pastimes.