Anybody have a link to the report? We can put it in the toptext if so
ramesh31
You just can't live in the Bay anymore, that's all there is to it. It'd be great if you could. But anything within a 2 hour commute requires a minimum of $200k salary to survive, let alone get ahead. Unless you're inheriting your parents house or piling into a roommate situation, it's just completely undoable over the long term. Compare this to NYC which has innumerable options when it comes to suburbs, with better transit, lower taxes, reasonably priced homes, and far greater apartment options. I don't see how SF ends up as anything but a place for raising capital in the future. The (true) middle class tech worker dream is dead and gone there.
cyberax
I will keep repeating this and I will keep getting downvoted for that. You can't out-build yourself out of high living costs. The only way to fix this is to start taxing dense office space as if it's toxic waste sites. And promote remote work to re-invigorate smaller cities.
gamblor956
...when including government employees and finance workers in the count of tech workers....because they use technology in their jobs. By that definition they use, the leader in "tech" employment is simply the metro with the most employees.
paxys
It’s a pretty simple explanation. Bay Area does not have much industry outside of tech. New York City is a hub for banking, investing, insurance, government, healthcare, consulting, real estate, fashion, law and more. All of these are now increasingly hiring tech workers directly and also retraining and transitioning their existing workforce to be more technical. So just by numbers alone Bay Area will never maintain a monopoly on tech jobs, especially considering the NYC employment market is several times the size. However if you just filter to the tech sector the numbers will be very different.
miiiiiike
Define "tech". If you're talking about programmers working at non-tech companies? Maybe. If you're talking about people excited about technology, then no. I lived in NYC for a decade. NYC is media and finance. And while I liked the people "in tech" that I met in NYC, the passion for the work just wasn't there enmasse.
xnx
NYC is also 10x the population of San Francisco.
nonameiguess
I'm not sure why this is remarkable. San Francisco is still the overall #1 thanks to whatever this report means by "quality" of talent. It seems some larger city was bound to overtake San Francisco in total quantity eventually. New York Metro has nearly three times the population of the Bay Area. The three-year negative growth for San Francisco (-6%) seems to be the reason here. Obviously, with Hacker News being so heavily populated itself by people living there who love to complain, we're going to see all the comments we're already starting to see citing housing costs as the reason, but San Francisco has had high housing costs for a long time now, and its negative growth is nowhere near the worst on this list. Milwaukee, Columbus, Phoenix all had even greater losses. Do those places have similar housing crises? Seattle is just as bad as San Francisco, isn't it? Yet it saw 13.1% positive growth, one of the largest numbers for an already large city. Toronto is expensive as hell, isn't it? They saw 26.5% growth. What other explanations are possible? Recent layoffs have affected web tech more than other tech, which is highly concentrated in the Bay? They've affected startups more than well-established Fortune 500s, also highly concentrated in the Bay?
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Discussion Highlights (8 comments)
dang
Anybody have a link to the report? We can put it in the toptext if so
ramesh31
You just can't live in the Bay anymore, that's all there is to it. It'd be great if you could. But anything within a 2 hour commute requires a minimum of $200k salary to survive, let alone get ahead. Unless you're inheriting your parents house or piling into a roommate situation, it's just completely undoable over the long term. Compare this to NYC which has innumerable options when it comes to suburbs, with better transit, lower taxes, reasonably priced homes, and far greater apartment options. I don't see how SF ends up as anything but a place for raising capital in the future. The (true) middle class tech worker dream is dead and gone there.
cyberax
I will keep repeating this and I will keep getting downvoted for that. You can't out-build yourself out of high living costs. The only way to fix this is to start taxing dense office space as if it's toxic waste sites. And promote remote work to re-invigorate smaller cities.
gamblor956
...when including government employees and finance workers in the count of tech workers....because they use technology in their jobs. By that definition they use, the leader in "tech" employment is simply the metro with the most employees.
paxys
It’s a pretty simple explanation. Bay Area does not have much industry outside of tech. New York City is a hub for banking, investing, insurance, government, healthcare, consulting, real estate, fashion, law and more. All of these are now increasingly hiring tech workers directly and also retraining and transitioning their existing workforce to be more technical. So just by numbers alone Bay Area will never maintain a monopoly on tech jobs, especially considering the NYC employment market is several times the size. However if you just filter to the tech sector the numbers will be very different.
miiiiiike
Define "tech". If you're talking about programmers working at non-tech companies? Maybe. If you're talking about people excited about technology, then no. I lived in NYC for a decade. NYC is media and finance. And while I liked the people "in tech" that I met in NYC, the passion for the work just wasn't there enmasse.
xnx
NYC is also 10x the population of San Francisco.
nonameiguess
I'm not sure why this is remarkable. San Francisco is still the overall #1 thanks to whatever this report means by "quality" of talent. It seems some larger city was bound to overtake San Francisco in total quantity eventually. New York Metro has nearly three times the population of the Bay Area. The three-year negative growth for San Francisco (-6%) seems to be the reason here. Obviously, with Hacker News being so heavily populated itself by people living there who love to complain, we're going to see all the comments we're already starting to see citing housing costs as the reason, but San Francisco has had high housing costs for a long time now, and its negative growth is nowhere near the worst on this list. Milwaukee, Columbus, Phoenix all had even greater losses. Do those places have similar housing crises? Seattle is just as bad as San Francisco, isn't it? Yet it saw 13.1% positive growth, one of the largest numbers for an already large city. Toronto is expensive as hell, isn't it? They saw 26.5% growth. What other explanations are possible? Recent layoffs have affected web tech more than other tech, which is highly concentrated in the Bay? They've affected startups more than well-established Fortune 500s, also highly concentrated in the Bay?