30 Austin tech CEOs headed to California in search of workers

First, Austin is NOTHING like Texas. It is a beacon of progressive hope in an otherwise bass-ackwards state. I moved to Austin from New York City by way of Portland, Oregon so believe me, when I say that there is no way I would live in TEXAS; Austin is anything but that.<p>Also, other reasons Austin may be attractive to potential candidates:<p>1.) No state income tax. This is huge. If you make $140k a year in SF, you take home significantly less than you do in Texas. Also, there is no "city tax" like SF has.<p>2.) Cost of living is HALF, that's right, HALF of SF. Beautiful homes or urban condos are available and priced well below what you would spend buying OR renting in SF.<p>1 + 2 = lots of $$ in your pocket.<p>Not to mention the fact that Austin is arguably the hippest city in the country from a growth perspective. With events like ACL and SXSW (plus the thousands of live music shows throughout the rest of the year), the creative arts scene is flourishing.<p>Finally, the weather. It was 86 degrees, no humidity on December 19th last year. And yes, it is HOT in the summer, but with all that extra cash, you can go live in Europe for a few months to beat the heat.

I'm going to have to agree with most others here. I live less than five hours from Austin, travel there for business occasionally and rarely get calls from companies in Austin interested in hiring me or if I know anyone they should hire.<p>On the flip side, I am rarely in the valley (a few times a year at best) and I get calls or emails almost weekly asking either if I am interested in a job or if I might know someone who is, most of these even offering sign on bonuses and bounties for hires.<p>Yet the CEO's of companies in Austin are trotting out to the valley to find the talent while everyday good programmers from surrounding states go to the valley because they don't see Austin as a viable alternative.<p>They have a top tier engineering program only hours away (Rice) which has basically become a funnel for Microsoft and Amazon in Seattle yet they want to focus their attention on the valley.<p>Go to schools like Georgia Tech, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois, UT. Alot of those kids are coming from the south or the midwest and they end up in the valley because they think that is the only place they can make it.<p>At the end of the day this really comes down to marketing, and when you spend your money marketing to developers that have already been sold on another city often you are too late, but if you hit them earlier like the valley has gotten so good at doing they are MUCH more likely to see Austin as a viable solution

I don't think this makes sense... I'm from MN and made a recent trip to the Bay area where all the local startups were clamoring over me. Meanwhile back in the midwest, I have to actively market myself to attract any attention. If you're really looking for untapped talent, go where nobody else is looking.

I've founded a couple of startups in Austin. The thing to know about Austin is that, at least right now, there are only about 6 consumer Internet startups of note who can afford real talent. Unless you move here for a specific position, or are a developer, finding a decent job will be tricky. If you like enterprise software, though, you'll be happier than a pig in mud.

This seems counter-intuitive, I thought the competition for hiring in the valley was already too high.<p>Isn't the benefit of being outside the valley cost of living and human capital?

How do they plan on convincing the average liberal democrat Californian to move to a conservative stronghold like Texas?

What about non-competes? If you take the offer of one of these companies, if their employee contract is of the standard type outside of California, you'd better save away enough money to move back to where they are non-enforceable as a matter of long standing public policy.

" The zero-sum-game hurts the overall tech community, so we've decided to come together to seek out new additions to Austin to help us all grow"<p>It's not a zero sum game. Every individual will produce a different amount of value depending on the position they are in.

And most of California is nothing like LA or SF! This drives me a bit nuts... I've done a ton of traveling, and while I think you can generally and accurately describe life in a certain city, it doesn't expand well to bigger geographies. Parts of France are nothing like Paris. Parts of Japan are nothing like Tokyo. In general, when choosing where to live, it's best to make sure you are a match on the city level. (Perhaps, too, give points to a city for being enough of a hub to make traveling easier.)

<i>The group is targeting engineers with experience in Java, Ruby on Rails and Python programming</i><p>I read this and thought, "hm, although the markets for RoR and Python are not massive, they have been growing at a good clip, perhaps that's a good area to focus on." (I'm from a background of C++ and PHP, and I'm thoroughly burnt out on them)<p>Then I realized that these guys are idiots. They're follow-the-crowd types who are ignoring masses of untapped talent elsewhere in the nation and <i>flying around</i> to recruit in the same "rockstar" seeking circle jerk as everyone else. It's no wonder they're short on talent, they probably don't have the slightest clue what it looks like.<p>So now I wonder, "hm, maybe those are actually just buzzword technologies and they won't hold up in the long run..."