As someone who does not want to live there either, I can see why people move there.
It's simply where the most opportunities are. The idea is to move there and live uncomfortably until you network your way to an awesome, high paying job.
Alternatively, the tech companies there usually do more interesting stuff than in other area. Here in NYC most are related to advertising or media—stuff not easy to get exited about. San Francisco has its large share of silly ideas for companies, but it also has many that do interesting stuff.
It is absolutely not where the most opportunities are. It is the place where the most startups are, which means the top of the opportunity pile eclipses other locations in terms of earning potential and networking. But quantitatively, the most programming jobs per capita are in Washington, Colorado, and Utah.
The more interesting companies are in the bay area I find personally. In Seattle you have amazon, which has a horrible reputation, and Microsoft, which has another kind of bad reputation, but is better than amazon. In the SFBA, you have facebook, apple, google, and many many others.
Also I don't find jobs / people in the state the most accurate indicator. To someone living in LA, moving to SF might as well be moving to Utah. The open positions / qualified people is the far more useful metric, and SF will still beat all of them on that.
Absolutely this, if I didn't have my business where I am I'd probably end up moving to London, it's the last place in the world I'd want to live but the salary gap even adjusting for cost of living/commuting is huge.
I could easily live somewhere cheap and commute for a few years then build up enough to move somewhere nicer.
What irritates me the most is there is absolutely no physical reason why London has to be the place for start ups in the UK and a whole bunch of reasons why it's not a good place.
Where I live now rent and house prices are incredibly cheap (even compared to most parts of the UK), the city is rolling out excellent fibre (I have 150Mbps at home and 100Mbps at work) and transport links are excellent, it would be a good place to start a software company (I am doing) but hiring is going to be hard since it will require relocation to get the talent needed (or working entirely remote, something I'm considering).
You don't have to live in San Francisco to work there. There are plenty of people who live on the other side of the bay and commute by train. This gives you a much more affordable place to live than San Francisco.
Or 10-20 minutes if you live in oakland and your company is on market st. It's faster to live in oakland and get to work than live in the western side of sf in that case.
Google maps thinks it's 36 minutes from Richmond station to Embarcadero station, and all the other combinations are slower. Where are you travelling between?
You're not at the end of the line in the East Bay, then. The BART ride alone would be at least 40 minutes, and that's if there wasn't some kind of delay.
Well there are options and nothing is perfect. If people want to live in an area with high demand and they are not willing to compromise, they should quit their complaining and pay the high rental costs.
I live in Austin and have seen many of my coworkers and friends leave for the bay area. Besides interesting work I think there are more opportunities for career growth.
I am in security (but it's similar in many specialties) and while there are very good companies in Austin if I want to to rise become a security architect or director of information security I have to go to the tech headquarters. Companies like Google and facebook may have regional offices but the core innovative security/ai/pl work and executive decision making is being done in the home campuses.
That being said, I would never leave Austin for the SF bay unless it involved a $350k+ salary.
For security you could also look at the DC area, especially if you're an AMCIT who wouldn't mind undergoing an SSBI. The downside is that most of those jobs are playing whack-a-mole with breaches, but for high-paying, high-profile forensics, response and research positions, federal contractors are hard to beat.
"And yet, clearly, plenty of people do choose to live in San Francisco."
Well, he didn't choose to live in San Francisco for long. By the end of his four years there, he decamped to Seattle, which seems to be the natural progression these days: live in SF and close a few deals in a tiny space, then move to Seattle into a slightly larger place and be amazed at all of the room you have.
It's a weird situation. There are so many tech companies out there and I'd like to work for some of them but I don't think the sacrifice I'll take with my standard of living will be worth it.
Why aren't SF tech companies hiring more remote workers? They could pay people who work remotely a lot less, save a lot on office space etc.
Tech companies are the ones that should be able to pull that off.
Even if I lived in SF I'd be reluctant to commute an hour to work if I could just as well work from home.
Remote work is an excellent paradigm when you get an assignment, go work on it for a while in total independence/isolation, and then turn it in, i.e. when developer-hours are perfectly commoditized. Not every software project is like this at every part of its lifecycle.
The same pitfalls that apply to outsourcing to low-cost-of-living countries should apply to hiring American remote workers: communication overhead, lack of context and understanding of what the product should be, etc. If a projects works well with remote workers in developed countries, consider that it's probably irrational and a borderline violation of fiduciary duty to pay extra for them rather than equally skilled workers in India/China/Eastern Europe.
I wouldn't forget that communication is deeply entwined with regional culture. I would argue that it is much easier to hire a remote worker from the same country then it is from a third world country (which are frequently known for remote work). Everything from time zones, work hours (say western European countries accustomed to ~5-7 actual work hours /day), laws, religion, etc.
Yes, one shouldn't confuse outsourcing and remote work: with remote work I mean people working in the same tools (version control, issue tracking etc) in the same time zone (+/- 1 hour), and being always available on chat/voice/video and occasional physical meetings.
Most people who work in a multi storey office communicate the same way with the people on a different storey as they would with people in a different city.
I work in an office, and everyone on my team is remote, including my boss. I might as well be working from home most of the time! But I like going into the office :)
Everyone keeps asking this question. The answer: they are hiring remote workers. But my question: where is the evidence that tech companies are not able to be profitable with their high payroll costs?
> But my question: where is the evidence that tech companies are not able to be profitable with their high payroll costs?
You could look at the growing number of layoffs at post-seed stage companies[1].
Or you could look at startups that voluntarily publish financial information. Take, for example, this one[2], which, as of June, was spending $525,000/month on payroll (equating to an all-in cost of $146,000/year per employee) when it had less than $300,000 of monthly bookings revenue.
A lot (perhaps the majority) of venture-backed Bay Area startups are entirely dependent on investor money to sustain their workforces at their current sizes. Even some of the tech companies in the area that have gone public aren't profitable. FireEye and Marketo are two that come to mind.
Everybody has been trading profitability for growth, and that's a game most will eventually lose.
1. Since when did "tech company" come to mean "non-startup"? Lots of startups are by definition technology companies.
2. Many people in the Bay Area are employed by angel and venture-backed startups, so how does it make sense to ignore them? If and when there's a significant downturn that results in the unsustainable startup herd being culled, not all startup employees are going to find six-figure replacement jobs at companies like Google and Facebook. People who lived through the first .com bust know how fast the job market can dry up for a large subset of employees.
3. It is absolutely not true that the Bay Area's unprofitable publicly-traded tech companies have "unlimited money" relative to anything. Review their SEC filings and you can determine how much money they have down to the dollar. You should not be surprised when those that struggle to reach profitability sooner or later take cost-cutting action, which may include layoffs and adjustments to employee compensation. Twitter just did this. Even profitable tech companies, like IBM and HP, have laid off significant numbers of employees. Bottom line: when push comes to shove and the shit hits the fan, companies tend to use large knives, not scalpels.
I worked in Colorado after the .com crash, the tech industry was devastated there, Bay Area companies that had opened offices in the area reconsolidated back in the Bay Area, rather than take advantage of lower payroll costs in Denver. It sounds good on paper to move out of the area, in practice it hadn't happened yet.
> And don’t forget about the importance of compound interest. I will remind you that $2k per month saved on rent for one year is $24k. Invested for 50 years averaging 6% interest comes to roughly $450k. Freedom. HTFU.
$450K towards retirement for one year of living in cramped, expensive SF sounds like it could be a reasonable payoff for many people.
Eh I moved my family (stay at home wife and two kids). If you are willing to live outside of the trendy areas you can find OK places. Unfortunately single family homes (like we inhabit now) are not rent-controlled. We're currently trying to decide between moving to a multi-unit building with a 3-bedroom place or staying and putting up with the ridiculous rent. The multi-unit building would still be high rent but at least it would be locked in forever.
It definitely costs my startup employer (and myself), especially factoring in preschool. It also steals a job and "juice" from the local economy - we'd have already hired a nanny if rents were merely 2x a normal city, and we'd happily spend more buying from local craftspeople. The money goes into my landlord's retirement account basically doing nothing.
> The money goes into my landlord's retirement account basically doing nothing.
Is your landlord's retirement account a sack under his bed? If not, that money is being invested in publicly traded companies or in bonds to fund public works. It is creating jobs, just not in your neighborhood.
It's simply where the most opportunities are. The idea is to move there and live uncomfortably until you network your way to an awesome, high paying job.
Alternatively, the tech companies there usually do more interesting stuff than in other area. Here in NYC most are related to advertising or media—stuff not easy to get exited about. San Francisco has its large share of silly ideas for companies, but it also has many that do interesting stuff.