[seanflyon]

What areas do you consider to be very cheap and talent filled? I always assumed that the expensive areas are expensive because well paid talent is driving up the cost of living (though city attitude towards construction plays a large role as well).

[bane]

Well, depends on what you consider cheap and talented I suppose. For example, there are loads of people in Portland and the surrounding area that are employable for far less than you'd get in the Bay Area (by about 35%). You have to work at it though, it's not as bad as offshoring, but you can't half-ass it. The talent won't go as high as the Bay Area, but you'll probably be able to find folks good enough to make the kind of CRUD apps most of us are making anyways.

Here's a list and the cost of living delta vs. San Francisco (which translates into direct salary costs for your business).

   Portland, OR - 35% cheaper
   Nashville, TN - 80% cheaper
   Atlanta, GA - 70%
   Miami, FL - 50%
   Tampa, FL - 70%
   Huntsville, AL - 70%
   Northern, VA - 20%
   Blacksburg, VA - 60%
   Charlottesville, VA - 50%
   Virginia Beach, VA - 60%
   Fredericksburg - 40% 
   Richmond - 60%
   Williamsburg - 50%
   Phoenix, AZ - 70%
   Columbus, OH - 80%
   Tri-cities area, WA - 70%
   Boston, MA - 20%
   Newark, NJ - 25%
   Austin, TX - 70%
   San Antonio, TX - 80%
   Ft Meade, MD - 30%
   Chicago, IL - 40%
   Minneapolis, MN - 50%
   Las Vegas, NV - 60%

Off the top of my head, if you can't hire people in Austin, Nashville, or Las Vegas, you're doing it wrong. All of those have large tech industries and/or are near large cities with big populations. Nashville is near both a big city and a major national lab. They're also cheap enough that you can basically hire two people for the price of one in San Francisco.

[seanflyon]

It's an arbitrary distinction, but I wouldn't consider an area "very cheap" until it was significantly below the nation average.

According to http://www.payscale.com/ cost of living in Austin Texas is 7% cheaper than the national average. I would consider that cheap, but not very cheap.

payscale just happened to be the first site that came up but its number seem a little less extreme than the ones you gave:

cost of living relative to SF: Phoenix: -41% Miami: -34% Anchorage: -23% Dallas: -41% New York: +38% Knoxville: -45%

I doubt you could hire the same quality of developer in Miami for half the cost (especially including benefits).

I don't mean to sound argumentative. "very cheap" is an arbitrary distinction and I have no idea if the cost of living number you gave are more or less accurate than the ones I found. There are many places with good developers and significantly lower cost of living than the bay area.

[Iftheshoefits]

Well, I've lived/worked in a couple of the locations on your list. I'll just say this: I think we have very different notions of what "large tech industry" means. I don't consider Tampa, FL or just about any of the VA listings to have "large" tech industries. Tampa's is especially slim, driven mainly by a couple of hospitals, the university, and a few defense/government contractors. VA's are driven mainly by defense/government contractors (having been there once, I'd not choose it again except as a last resort, and then only reluctantly) and some finance.

[bane]

If you don't think Northern VA or South East VA are large tech industries, then we have very different dictionaries. NoVA/D.C. is only the home to the second largest tech center in the country, larger than NYCs. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a tech company of any size along the Dulles tech corridor. With a 5% unemployment rate, there are literally thousands of job openings there, the demand is unbelievably high. If that doesn't qualify as a large tech industry, then nothing does.

Blacksburg and Charlottesville have all the advantages of a place like MIT or Stanford. Nice STEM focused college towns full of ready to work STEM students who'd love to stay in those towns and low costs of living. If you want to open a remote office, those are good places to do it.

Tampa has a sizable tech industry as well. If you didn't notice it, it's because you, like most people, aren't paying attention or you've dismissed every possible company you could have worked for because it wasn't in with the cool crowd. I wonder how many folks in Tampa wouldn't mind working for Tampa pay but get equity in an SV startup?

Here's 5 minutes of looking for Tampa tech companies. If there's companies, there's tech employees you can hire for your company. Tech companies can't exist where there aren't people they can hire. (all of these had open tech positions and I didn't even look for non-tech companies with open tech positions)

   - http://www.actsoft.com/
   - http://www.connectwise.com/
   - http://www.e-ins.net/
   - http://www.fairwarning.com/
   - http://www.syniverse.com/home
   - ...

you know what...screw the list, here's 7 thousand developer position near Tampa http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=software+developer&l=Tam...

I bet most of these are for some boring insurance company, healthcare or real estate company. How many people do you think you can find who want to work for a SV company and get SV startup perks?

Here's Nashville with almost 7,000 more open positions.

http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=software+developer&l=Nas...

Portland, a tech friendly city, only has twice as many openings.

http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=software+developer&l=Por...

Guess who has more open positions on this board? San Francisco or Washington D.C.?

http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=software+developer&l=san...

http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=software+developer&l=Was...

The point is that there is plenty of tech industry all over the place, and people in those areas can be hired at fractions of San Francisco's going rates.

People also don't like working in boring shitty jobs and the allure of working for a startup, with high payout equity can be a good alternative, if it's offered to them.

But Silicon Valley Myopia makes it impossible to see this. It's easier to sell hiring in Hyderabad than in Austin sometimes, and that's a shame.

While I see posts on San Francisco's labor shortage and the desire to get more H-1B visas, I can't help think of the hundreds of thousands of qualified tech employees all over the rest of the country. It's not expensive to set up a remote office and not hard to manage one either. If a SV startup can spin a photo sharing site as "changing the world" they can spin opening a remote office in Alabama as a an actual world changer.

Here's a very relevant example https://gaganpreet.github.io/hn-hiring-mapped/src/web/

[Iftheshoefits]

First, I'm not in the "cool crowd" here in the Valley, nor am I particularly interested in it. I actually enjoy writing C++ code, and developing in C++ code bases. It excites me to see compiler errors that break my terminal's scroll history almost as much as to see a successful build, I get a bit giddy whenever I have the opportunity to fire up gdb, and I enjoy the prospect of trying to design a system with a multithreaded or parallel execution model (although I wouldn't rate myself as being highly skilled at the latter). I think we share similar views with respect to SV's myopia regarding hiring practices.

That said, suffice to say that I view quality as mattering at least as much as quantity when it comes to making these comparisons.

The kinds of jobs you describe, with some exceptions of course, are analogous to Wal-Marts or Target jobs in retail. Sure, one might say that technically there is a "large retail industry" in an area filled with Targets and Wal-Marts, but one wouldn't say it's a very good industry that attracts the best retail talent, and admittedly I suppose that's something I implicitly include when I determine what constitutes "large" or not.

[bane]

Yeah, I think we can definitely agree on that point. The offerings available for the average tech worker in a Nashville obviously aren't going to be as good as for SV.

But it wouldn't take too many companies hiring in these places either to create a reasonable ecosystem of high quality jobs. Airbnb, Getaround, Aerohive, Prosper and Palantir are all trying to fill hundreds of positions.

A "startup park" in Nashville and Austin, offering low rent or favorable taxes to SV and local startups would allow these companies to setup 10-50 person dev shops very quickly. People get to stay where they want to, companies fill their positions and local economies get to attract/retain high-end tech workers. Repeat for growth and eventually you'll hit a self-sustaining critical mass and now you have "the SV of Texas" or "the SV of Cumberland River" or whatever.

My point is not that there are sexy cool jobs in these areas, but there is a sufficiently trained labor pool that it's not hard for your sexy cool company to setup an office and hire a group of 10 developers and a manager and offload some of your CRUD work to be developed at 60-70% the original cost.

The problem is that SV startups keep acting like this is some kind of intractable problem, but it's honestly not all that hard (source: I've set up 3 remote offices in the past for just this kind of work).

[Iftheshoefits]

It is something of a feedback loop.

I think my last comment may have implied a bit of disdain for the quality of talent in non-SV places. That isn't the case. I agree with you, I think, that the number and quality of talent outside of SV is sufficient to sustain almost any startup in theory. In practice, purely for artificial reasons, it doesn't hold.

There are two barriers to reaching the "critical mass" you note outside of the valley:

1. The "critical mass" in SV of "interesting," "good" (or whatever favorite positive adjective might apply) is just huge. Even the least interesting corporate-y jobs are strongly influenced by the culture here, and that is a big draw for talent from bottom to top. That's all I really meant, earlier: the density of "good" jobs here is very large.

2. SV is (over-?)run with people who--and this is another of my unpopular opinions around here--have huge egos. I mean spectacularly huge egos. I come from a background of academic research (very mathematical in nature). Yet I never saw such egos as I've seen in this industry. The barrier here is something of a self-imposed psychological one, I think: the fact is that the vast majority of startups don't need even a single person who has an advanced, in-depth, and broad understanding of mathematics, data structures, algorithms, or basically anything else in academic CS, but they seem to treat it as the minimum necessary element to hire. The armchair psychologist in me opines that the interview process in this industry is more about certain people trying to impress themselves or prop their own egos up instead of just accepting that working on some shopping cart, ad analytics platform, or generic-social-media-app-X just isn't that complicated (speaking academically/intellectually here). They don't want to think they're working on something that is academically trivial, and so they engage in employee selection processes that reinforce the view that everything they do is super intellectual and requires only the best minds from the CS world to succeed.