[todd8]

My anecdotal observation about the size of companies moving to Texas is different. My neighbor just moved his company of three hundred employees to Austin. Another neighbor's company, Dimensional Fund Advisors relocated to Austin, about 1000 employees. On my small street (10 families), half work for or run companies that moved operations to Austin. Toyota just moved to a suburb of Dallas, 4000 employees. The operational cost savings are substantial.

[legodt]

The specific suburb Toyota moved to, Plano (75093), is notable because it is the home of many large companies, tech included. Companies like PepsiCo/Frito-Lay, Gearbox, and UGS are headquartered there alongside large offices for companies such as HP and various financial institutions. Plano is an upper-middle to upper class suburb of Dallas where housing for families is far more accessible than inside of Dallas itself. Whether this suburb-based expansion model can apply to other tech hubs in different states is debatable, but the pattern is still worth noting.

[amyjess]

By the way, the proper term for something like Plano is an "edge city" [0]. It's a suburb that's managed to grow enough of its own industry that residents can both live and work here without having to commute to the city.

Personally, I love it. I have a very cheap cost of living (paying $1 per sq. ft. means you're being gouged here), a spacious home in an area with no noise, and a short commute all at the same time. Also, since we have so much tech industry here bringing a lot of H1-B workers and other diverse employees (plus a major tech university that hosts a large number of international students), there's been a huge boom in good ethnic food here. Dallas is kinda the opposite of most other cities: where other cities have white flight suburbs and a diverse urban core, Dallas has huge concentrations of Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese people (among many, many other ethnicities) in the suburbs, while the city is full of white hipsters who think living in a tiny loft is cool. As such, you find the best food in the suburbs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_city

[whamlastxmas]

Plano is not what I would describe as upper class. There are definitely areas surrounding Plano that are, but they are very small pockets.

[ashwinaj]

Yup, but these aren't "tech" companies. These are traditional manufacturing, finance, insurance (I've heard about State Farm moving to Richardson, TX) etc.

Apart from AMD (when it was on the brink) moving it's HQ to Austin from Sunnyvale, I can't think of any other "tech" company moving major operations from SV to elsewhere.

[the_watcher]

According to the SF Chronicle[1], over 2 dozen tech companies moved from the Bay Area to Austin since 2014.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Tech-pipeline-to...

[kbenson]

Does it provide names? I'm curious, but that article is behind a paywall.

[the_watcher]

It provides 2 names, both of which I hadn't heard of, but they were B2B data providers, which is a space that I regularly find companies I have never heard of before.

[amyjess]

Makes sense. Texas is very big on B2B.

The Dallas area is filled with companies that make nothing but B2B telecom and UC solutions.

[netheril96]

Shouldn't it be easier to move tech companies than manufacturing companies?

[HillRat]

Technically, it's trivial to manufacture carpet anywhere you want -- but 85% of all US-made carpets are manufactured in Dalton, Georgia. Likewise, theoretically it's easy to develop software from anywhere (or many anywheres), but in practice you will benefit from the secondary effects of locating in a major tech hub -- or even a minor one. Some of this has to do with ease of recruitment of qualified candidates, but also the network effects of having a large number of tech companies and groups interacting with each other, leading to an overall improvement in capabilities and quality. Finally, funding is a key controller; in the Bay Area, funding can be as simple as opportunistically pitching a GP during a shared UberPool, but in regions without mature VC and angel economies, you'll have to fight harder, and pay more, for those investments.

[elif]

lol do VCs really take pool?

[ashwinaj]

On paper, yes. But this argument has been around for quite a while and we haven't seen any major companies moving operations (ever after the recession). The company I worked for in Austin was a remote location and HQ was in SV. Hardly any engineering employees wanted to move to Austin, despite the fact that they were offered very generous packages. Most employees in Austin were tech support, sales, HR etc. essentially back office.

If you can convince your influential engineering employees to move, that can work. But if they don't want to move, your hands are tied.

[sbardle]

Especially with the rise of remote working and services like Slack.

[TeMPOraL]

The "rise of remote working" was supposed to happen 20 years ago. We should all be working from home for a good decade now. Instead, management invented excuses like "importance of teamwork", "serendipity happening at the water cooler", etc. Another messaging app won't change that by itself.

[kd0amg]

I still haven't found a "remote" replacement for gathering around a whiteboard to work out some system design issues. Whiteboard-through-a-webcam has been mostly ok as long as everyone is almost on the same page to begin with, but it gets cumbersome as soon as anyone misunderstands anything.

[andyjdavis]

It is worth noting that there actually are plenty of remote workers. Most people are presumably unaware of them for two reasons:

1) People who work remotely are clustered in companies that allow remote working. If you don't work for a company that will let you work remotely then you probably don't work with any remote workers.

2) Remote workers can often choose their location so they cluster in more desirable locations which, statistically speaking, you probably do not live in.

I worked remotely for 2011-2015 within a company that had approximately 1/3 of its workforce working remotely. As I could go where I wanted I spent most of my time overseas. Spent a lot of time in SE Asia. Places like Chiang Mai in Thailand and Bali in Indonesia have no shortage of people working remotely either as an employee, freelancing or starting a business.