The case against living in the Bay Area, for ambitious tech people

At Google, HR has dictated to our team "no Bay-area hiring" for over a year now. It seems at least one company agrees with "There’s no surplus value in hiring in the Bay Area".

There are obvious exceptions to everything. But I’ve lived in Atlanta, Orlando, SF and Seattle.<p>Moving to SF was a career multiplier. I instantly doubled my salary.<p>Now, I’m earning 2-5x more than my peers (that were more senior than me) that chose to live in those cities.<p>Walmart was started in Arkansas. Warren Buffet famously lives in Nebraska.<p>But the Tier 1 cities create more wealth for more people than Tier 2 or 3 cities.

This article conflates the notion of being &quot;in tech&quot; with being a CEO for some reason. The vast majority of people &quot;in tech&quot; will be workers, not CEOs. For those people, a statement like &quot;There’s no surplus value in hiring in the Bay Area&quot; should sound like a good thing.

As a UK national I would love to move to the US for better opportunities and weather. Getting a visa seems next to impossible, short of marrying an American. I probably missed my chance in the pre Covid tech boom.

<i>The TV show Silicon Valley lampooned all these ideas a decade ago. The weird thing I’ve noticed is that when Bay Area tech people watch that show, they don’t seem to understand that they’re being made fun of. They think they’re being celebrated. That’s how thick the bubble is.</i><p>I&#x27;ve never met a person who didn&#x27;t understand that this show is satire. Every single tech person I&#x27;ve talked to about Silicon Valley thinks it&#x27;s funny <i>because</i> of how plausible and yet ridiculous it all is, and because of all the totally accurate details scattered throughout—from golden handcuffs &#x2F; resting &amp; vesting, down to minor things like which drinks were stocked in the show&#x27;s office fridges. And I lived in the Bay Area during its entire run, so most of my network is current&#x2F;former Bay Area tech people.

Continental allergies destroy talent. This applies to much of the east coast as well as they’re downstream of the continent.<p>I agree with much of this post, but there is a reason the areas with the highest intellectual output are on the coast.<p>I just moved from Dallas to the bay. Going from multiple allergy medicines a day and a persistent brain fog from ragweed and mountain cedar to none. Going from keeping windows closed with co2 levels spiking to levels that effect cognition to living with windows open and breathing fresh air. There is a reason Texas is where dying companies relocate to.

Outside of wanting to work at some tier 1 startup like OpenAI or being a CTO&#x2F;CISO, I see no financial incentive to live&#x2F;work in a metro area like the Bay area. I&#x27;d like to see some comparison between a remote worker getting a &quot;Good&quot; tech salary (mid 200s-low 300s) in low CoL area and some Netflix engineer in Los Gatos making $750k year but paying the high taxes&#x2F;housing&#x2F;food&#x2F;etc.

If anything, it&#x27;s a case for building more housing and public transit. Either this happens or it&#x27;ll continue bleeding jobs to other metros<p>Having corporations bring jobs here with the current housing situation is kind of irresponsible. In the long run, if they spent some %age of money on yimby causes, they could save money by reducing the cost of living

About the &quot;tautological&quot; part: Economic feedback loops are natural and don&#x27;t diminish from the value of being in the area. At one point I went there to open doors that probably wouldn&#x27;t have been reachable otherwise. Silicon Valley isn&#x27;t a perfect circle either, because it wasn&#x27;t just created from nowhere decades ago.<p>The only reason I don&#x27;t live there anymore is because I already got the &quot;in&quot; I needed, I think remoteness actually works best if you&#x27;re ambitious (provided you visit occasionally), and because I really didn&#x27;t like living there. Idc if someone takes the last part as an excuse, my work speaks for itself.

I’m glad I have no ambition, I guess.