[HN Gopher] Silicon Valley's tech monopoly is over. Is the futur...
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Silicon Valley's tech monopoly is over. Is the future in Austin,
Texas?
Author : graaben
Score : 16 points
Date : 2022-02-10 21:24 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latimes.com)
| blast wrote:
| The article contradicts its hypey headline:
|
| _To be sure, the Bay Area has such a deep reservoir of tech
| talent, money and infrastructure, not to mention the climate and
| the ocean, that it won't be easily knocked off its perch._
| reaperducer wrote:
| Seems like yet another clickbaity article. How many times have
| we seen this same story with different geographies?
|
| Every town on the planet with an internet connection and a
| chamber of commerce has named itself Silicon Prairie (at least
| three of them), Silicon Bayou, Silicon Gorge, Silicon Water,
| Silicon Alps, Silicon Glen, Silicon and on and on.
| mythrwy wrote:
| There's a guy in my tiny one horse town in the middle of
| nowhere running for mayor right now (unlikely to break 1
| digit percent of the vote) that wants to make the town a
| Bitcoin mining capital.
|
| I should approach him about the possibility of making this
| the next Silicon Valley so I can be inundated with job offers
| without having to move.
| jseliger wrote:
| cmd-f "Non-compete" then "compete." https://www.vox.com/new-
| money/2017/2/13/14580874/google-self...
|
| Until Texas, or Washington State, or other relevant jurisdictions
| ban non-competes, California will continue to have a key edge,
| despite its varieties of political and social dysfunction.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Silicon Valley has a confluence of things many other areas do
| _not_ have.
|
| 1. _Several_ high class feeder schools in the area including but
| not limited to Stanford and UC Berkeley. Note the feeder schools
| have robust CS programs but also renowned business and law
| schools.
|
| 2. A robust banking sector in San Francisco (for access to Old
| Money).
|
| 3. A bunch of New Money investors (Sand Hill Road gang etc) that
| you can wine and dine in-person.
|
| 4. California has a ton of high tech businesses besides just
| plucky Web startups.
|
| A lot of supposed Silicon * regions have one or two of these
| things but rarely all within a two hour plane ride of each other
| (if not closer). Austin is nice and all but Silicon Valley (the
| nine-county Bay Area) is a megaregion with a population of over 7
| million people with another two million in the combined
| statistical area. It's got twice the population of the San
| Antonio and Austin MSAs combined. That just makes for a much
| larger pool of we-don't-need-to-relocate employees for start ups
| or new efforts for existing companies.
|
| It sucks Silicon Valley is so damned expensive but some other
| regions just being cheaper isn't going to pull away many
| startups. Despite bitching about taxes companies _really_ like
| the fact non-competes are basically void in California. They
| incorporate and "headquarter" in tax havens anyways.
| pkdpic wrote:
| I feel like someone smarter than me is going to point this out.
| But was this monopoly ever a reality? ie Microsoft, Amazon etc.
| Maybe the article gets into that too.
|
| Regardless I like that the article represents a possible shift in
| public narrative. Even though I question the moral reasoning and
| long-term sustainability of shifts like this occurring with a (if
| not the) dominant motivation being tax avoision.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220209121544/https://www.latim...
| [deleted]
| dontblink wrote:
| Almost always the answer to a question in a headline is No
| (Betteridge's law of headlines). I think there is a lot of
| wishful thinking about breaking SV's dominance. Reasons being
| that it is such a HCOL area and how great would it be to live
| elsewhere! Truth be told, high tech salaries are not as high in
| other regions compared to the COL (in the general sense). SV has
| at least two top engineering schools (UCB and Stanford), and many
| people are unwilling to give up the easy opportunity to switch
| jobs and _not_ move.
|
| There is also this gravity effect of SV. People move to SV to get
| a tech job, so thats where the majority of them are. But from
| talking to folks, there is a real lack of available talent, so
| companies are forced to look elsewhere. From my own experience,
| there are not a huge number of available candidates in other
| areas either.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Marge Simpson: Sweetie, you could still go to McGill, the Harvard
| of Canada.
|
| Lisa Simpson: Anything that's the "something" of the "something"
| isn't really the "anything" of "anything".
|
| I'm hesitant to say things won't change because folks who say
| that are usually wrong, but if I _had_ to put money on it, I
| wouldn 't put more than $1k (1:1) that by 2027 tech company
| capital deployed net 2022 is higher in Austin-Round Rock-
| Georgetown MSA than in the SF Bay Area.
| kbos87 wrote:
| I think it's equally fair to ask if the future is more
| distributed in nature. Yes, maybe Austin becomes more of a
| concentrated home of tech than it was before, but haven't we seen
| it proven out over the last two years that companies can be
| successful working apart, hiring the best folks they can find
| regardless of location (many of who would prefer to stay in low
| COL locations?)
|
| Regardless of your personal ideology on the topic, there are too
| many benefits for all parties involved to ignore remote work as a
| lasting trend.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| The monopoly is over. But it's not the end. And the future is not
| solely just Austin.
| arlogilbert wrote:
| It is 2:12 in California and 4:12 in Texas, so I think the answer
| is clear.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| My understanding is that a major reason why the Bay Area became
| the tech hub it did is because of academic institutions like
| Stanford and Berkeley, which in turn led to commercial
| enterprises like HP, Shockley, and Fairchild. From there, it was
| like dandelion seeds in the wind, with alumni from those
| companies going on to found AMD, Kleiner Perkins, Xerox PARC,
| etc.
|
| It seems to me that, until UT Austin catches up with Stanford and
| Berkeley in its ability to churn out tech talent, we can apply
| Betteridge's law of headlines here (i.e. "Any headline that ends
| in a question mark can be answered by the word no.").
|
| If anything, the biggest threat to Silicon Valley's dominance
| seems to be the post-COVID trend of remote-friendly tech
| employers. That has already benefited Austin, but not exclusively
| so.
| yumraj wrote:
| > academic institutions like Stanford and Berkeley,
|
| and dare I say politics. For various reasons, including the
| rather diverse nature of tech workforce due to a substantial
| number of immigrants and even otherwise, the tech workforce is
| generally liberal or are at least centrist moderate. Texas is
| not an ideal home for most of them.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _tech workforce is generally liberal or are at least centrist
| moderate. Texas is not an ideal home for most of them._
|
| That stereotype is about a decade out of date.
|
| Texas is very much like New York, California, Washington,
| Nevada, Oregon, and most other American states: Blue large
| cities surrounded by red elsewhere.
| hellisothers wrote:
| Except all those states you listed are blueish (including
| purplish or very blue) where Texas is deep red.
| reaperducer wrote:
| The list was examples, and not exhaustive. It's also true
| in Arizona, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and
| probably a bunch of other states that I'm less familiar
| with.
|
| My point stands, though. The Texas thing is still a
| stereotype, and still at least a decade out of date.
| b0sk wrote:
| This is absolutely true. People like Austin because it's
| weird and it's a liberal area but pretty sure the state level
| politics is going to affect you even if you want to be
| shielded somehow.
| dnautics wrote:
| No way. As a person of "overrepresented in tech" color,
| Austin is WAY friendlier to non-whites than California ever
| was. I regularly see groups of "bros" walking around/hanging
| out/eating out in interracial groups, which I would never see
| in the bay. There are LOTS of immigrants here, as well,
| though not as many as in Cali, but nothing to sneeze at.
|
| And finally if Mexico can get its act together and (some city
| there) become a replacement for Shenzhen, access to Mexico
| will be huge.
|
| It's not perfect. There is at least one thing on my mind that
| could hold back Austin, but it's not anything you mentioned.
| quantified wrote:
| Defense spending routed through those places. But there's also
| more of a cultural value of risk-taking than the super-
| conservative nature of Boston, which has MIT and Harvard but
| also a more-diverse set of concerns that use computers.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| As is almost always the case, when a headline asks a question,
| the answer is no.
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(page generated 2022-02-10 23:02 UTC)