| 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 |
A direct appeal to founders and investors to start more ventures and offices in Texas, for the advantageous business climate, would make more sense.... but such an effort wouldn't be led by CEOs/recruiters from established firms... who probably don't want the competition of more employers.