What's the Best City for Techies in 2024?

This is clearly written with the starting premise &quot;How do I show that the Bay Area is no longer the best place&quot;. You can see the biases throughout the piece.<p>For example, the chart with the top tax rates. Yes it&#x27;s technically true that the top rate in California is 13.3% for incomes over $1M. But then they used that tax rate against the &quot;tax adjusted income&quot; but the income was only $300K.<p>They also have subjective measures that unsurprisingly put the Bay Area lower on the list.<p>I&#x27;m not saying the Bay Area is the best, but I&#x27;m saying this analysis is flawed and biased.

When I lived in the Bay Area, it was a ball of stress to &quot;keep up&quot; the salary to be able to enjoy anything, as I wasn&#x27;t being paid those &quot;top salaries&quot; everyone uses in their data summaries. I couldn&#x27;t ever purchase a home, and these were important things to my lifestyle. I moved to Seattle and now I&#x27;m seeing these obscene pricing trends happening here (and with the worse weather, too, sigh).<p>I think the best city is the one where you find a sense of belonging and contentness. Data doesn&#x27;t cover all the nuances of happiness.

Does anybody have a theory as to why Seattle&#x27;s startup ecosystem is so bad compared to all of its other metrics?<p>I moved here a few years ago and it feels like the culture nudges people away from defining their life based on their work (compared to SF&#x2F;NYC at least), but that feels like a generally handy-wavy explanation. Presumably there&#x27;s enough MS + Amazon money floating around to get a decent angel&#x2F;venture scene started.

How many of those Seattle roles are for Amazon and Microsoft?<p>What&#x27;s missing here when selecting the &quot;Best City&quot; is what sort of variety is there in the market? Surely you don&#x27;t want to feel as if you have to stay at a company just because there aren&#x27;t many other options in your area.<p>In the last table there needs to be a line item for: # of Unicorn Companies, or # of Publicly Traded Tech Companies.

What is it with people and not understanding percentages? &quot;How Much Less Do Techies Get Paid Outside the Bay?&quot; &quot;SF Bay Area 100%&quot; &quot;Miami -88%&quot; So people in Miami are paying to work? And even if it was meant to be relative to a baseline (which is not what it says!); i have a very hard time believing that they get only 12% the pay in Miami compared to SF.

Haha not a word about social issues or crime. I wonder why.

This has zero mention of the quality of work. If you don&#x27;t want to work for MS or Amazon Seattle probably doesn&#x27;t look as good.<p>Hardly scientific but I tend to think each city seems to have attracted different kinds of companies, and not all of us are as interested in working for some types of companies as others. Personally I&#x27;d rather avoid anything to do with social media, advertising, online shopping, etc.. Health insurance SWE jobs would also not be at the top of my list.<p>I do wonder if this matters less if you&#x27;re a PM, as the author is, and whether the fact he&#x27;s a PM changes his calculation as much. I think if I was a PM company culture and how demanding customers were might be a big factor.<p>PMs seem to be in short supply even compared to engineers and the pay figures he&#x27;s citing might reflect that. A lot of places I&#x27;ve worked PM has seemed to be enough of a disaster people don&#x27;t want to do it. And that&#x27;s even with it seemingly being easier to move from engineer -&gt; PM than the other way around.

Judgements based on lifestyle, value for money, politics or any other similar factors are obviously going to be very subjective, but it is absurd to make the argument that anywhere outside of the Bay Area is better for starting or growing your tech career. Silicon Valley is still where all the top tech companies of every size and scale are hiring, it&#x27;s where all the top talent is concentrated, it&#x27;s where the majority of startups are popping up, it&#x27;s where all the VCs are, it&#x27;s where most of the tech networking happens. There is a reason OpenAI and Anthropic are only hiring in-office in San Francisco.

Hilarious to state that Seattle wins over Austin in the weather and politics categories. And completely ignores crime rates.

Any city with a good Internet connection.

Clicked through wondering if Bristol, UK, or Talinn, Estonia might make an appearance, but I guess the author missed a word from the title.

I like this article but there are a few things worth mentioning:<p>Total job postings can be wildly inaccurate. I know for example, Google will post a job opening, but you have no idea how many teams are actually hiring. It&#x27;s much more likely you&#x27;ll see one or two job openings in LA and the Bay Area, but the latter will have five times as many teams that are actually hiring.<p>Second is the fact that office flexibility matters a lot. Having to be in an office in Santa Monica 5 days a week is going to drastically impact your lifestyle compared to say, 2 days a week, in which you could live in a much less expensive place.<p>I live in Orange County and while housing is not cheap, what you can get for 2 million bucks would likely cost 4 million in the bay area.

I am not understanding how they get -88% from $300k to $160k, thats less than a 50% drop.<p>Its also a bit presumptuous that seattle wins on “politics”. The author is generalizing based on their own preferences, i am sure plenty choose miamia or texas for the exact opposite reason.

Seems like an oversight to disinclude Chicago, Raleigh (Research Triangle), and Salt Lake City.

I would argue the best city for tech has never been the bay area. Its the best place to make a lot of money in tech, but by far the best engineers I have met, and the ones who have the happiest most well adjusted lifes do not, and never have lived in the bay area. Seattle is somewhat similar, for new transplants, but there is a historical core that had a great quality of life previously.<p>If you are starting a company today and want the top decile of talent, you will mostly find them looking for remote roles. You will find some great workers who live in the big cities, and still want the in office experience, but by far the best people are living remotely.

I live in Seattle and the article shows a pretty arbitrary list of criteria, half of which have nothing to do with tech. Outdoor recreation is great but what about decent bars, dating scene, food, startups, tech meetups, university public events in tech? How easy is it to find a roommate, do you need a car and so on. Some of the criteria would also make more sense on a per capita basis.

Any similar breakdowns for Canadian cities?

Seems like they’re not accounting for Fintech in NYC, some of which is private e.g. Bloomberg

TLDR: USA only, not &quot;the world&quot;.<p>&gt; But Covid reordered the world. Combined with friendly inquiries, I wanted to re-examine what the best city for techies is in the brave new world of more remote and hybrid work.