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Study Says Massachusetts Best State For Technology
Anonymous Coward writes "The Milken Institute (site is cnn/msnbc/wapo dotted it seems) has released a study claiming MA is the best state for technology while Texas has dropped to 26th. I'm curious on everyone's thoughts on this. It seems to me Arizona and Austin are most attractive because of the low cost of living and lots of open space. I just don't see (in my job hunting) very many start-up or expansion in the states they list at the top.
Lots more at Google News."
Reader footh adds a link to a PDF of the results.
Read it in the paper this morning. "The index is a composite of indicators such as the growth of venture capital funding, number of new start-ups, research and development spending, percentage of workers in high-tech fields, number of technology companies and percentage of people with college degrees."
And as the owner of a venture-capital-less internet small business in Texas with no college degree, I find the survey a poor indicator of technology in a state - especially coming from a company that can't even keep their server online.
How you say? I fart in your general direction.
RadicalBender.com
Massachusetts does seem to be (slowly) embracing open source software. There's an article on ZopeZen discussing the use of Zope in particular in Massachusetts, but it looks like the Zope adoption is just a small part of a much bigger plan.
I've lived in Austin my entire life. I've seen the town grow from peaceful and comfortable to rude and crowded.
You may THINK there is lots of room in Austin... but really, THINK AGAIN! The traffic here is AWFUL!!! I have an hour+ commute each day one-way (and it use to be 20 minutes before the big boom). The city is just not prepared to deal with all you folks from all-over-creation trying to come and live here because its some sort of "fairy-land-great-place-to-live." It USE to be. That's before everyone and their dog moved here.
As for living here -- I'm a New England native and can't stand the Boston area. Crowded, difficult to get around, insane taxes, the Big Dig and so, so expensive. I make 7x what I earned in grad school and still feel poorer now than I did then. I'd love to get a job in, say, north Route 128 that allowed me to live someplace cheaper/nicer without the insane commute, but if you're in a comfortable situation elsewhere, don't go thinking the grass is greener on this side.
And don't get me started on that long-term capital gains worksheet...!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I go to San Jose, more often than I care to. I talk to people who work there, and the horror stories they tell. Many of the H1B types I meet are "hot-bunking", 7-9 people living in a 2 bedroom apartment. Sending as much cash as they can back home. Certain valley companies engage in a kind of white collar slave labor, IMO.
For other Americans, who actually want to make a living wage, and go home to a family, you need to think out of the box. If you have a clean record, and are US born, look at the Aerospace industry. Look at Florida. I met an entire group of high level EE/CS types who were relocating to Alaska to work on a missle defense program and one other had a job with the State of Alaska.
It's not surprising that the top ten states this year were the top ten states last year (and the bottom 10 states were, with one exception, the bottom 10 states last year.) But what's up with Rhode Island??? 21 to 11 in one year isn't too shabby....
More sugar!
On the other side of the survey, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Kentucky are 50, 49, and 48, respectively.
For a business owner looking for tech talent, it means bad news for those states. But what about for us, the aforementioned "talent"? Shouldn't this mean that if I move to Jackson, Little Rock, or Bowling Green, that my skills will be in higher demand?
Interestingly, in my family's home town of Hazard, KY, there's a call center for SHPS. Those are a few hundred jobs that are staying here instead of going to India. Would moving call centers to MS/AR/KY help those states improve? That's a policy I'd like to see Kerry implement.
BTW, word in Hazard is that SHPS absolutely sucks as a place to work, with high pressure and no advancement. But it's better than the welfare office.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
... that way my home state (ND) would do better in the rankings. I think this would be a more fair comparison because 'doing more with less' is generally considered a good thing.
It seems to me Arizona and Austin are most attractive because of the low cost of living and lots of open space.
:-/. (Last year, Governor Davis raised UC fees by 30%, and this year Governor Schwarzenegger is raising graduate UC fees by 40%. For the professional [law, med, business] schools, there's almost no difference between UC and private institutions... except that the privates tend to be better at getting you scholarships. The UC system used to do a great job at keeping our best and brightest in the state, as well as attracting those from far and wide... but we're seriously losing that edge.)
The low cost of living argument doesn't help anyone in the US anymore. If a company is interested in relocating some of its jobs (like call centers) to somewhere with a low cost of living, they have *no* motivation to choose somewhere inside the US. They can do much, much better by relocating overseas.
On another note, I saw Ross DeVol (cited in the article) speak at a panel on Southern California's Regional Economy at UCLA last fall. He had some interesting stuff to say/show about the differences between Southern California and the rest. The issue of importing well-educated labor came up then, too... and he wasn't the only one who brought it up. California is going to keep falling behind as long as we keep raiding our school systems for money
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
The technology might be great, but let's look at the quality of life.
High Taxes (income, property, real estate, car, excise).
Lots of gubmint interference
High fees for lic, reg, insurance, title, etc. etc.
PITA to own a gun for self defense.
Outrageous cost of housing
6 months of winter, and the roads are salted so your car will rot out (sheds tear for his decapitated but loved car)
Lots of rudeness and Hate (A house for sale near Boston was set on fire by White neighbors when they discovered the people buying it were Black)
The RMV is staffed by people who actively enjoy being rude and hateful.
So yes, the tech might be great, but there is a LOT more to life (cause when you are on your deathbed, no one says "I wish I had spent more time in MA!:) which can more easily be found in TN, for example...
from 1998-2002. I made great money, built a house up near the NH border (just off 95), then sold that sucker when everyone else realized no one could afford to live within 10 miles of Boston.
.5 acre lots that *started* at $650k. Then you had to pay extra for things like cabinets, countertops, faucets, flooring, appliances, etc.
The commuter line goes all the way to Newburyport, so complaining about public transportation is a bit disingenuous.
My house appreciated 33% in less than two years. I used the money to leave my job and come back to my native state...(number 3 on the list, BTW), and it took me 4.5 months, and all of that money to get a new job. (well, plus the downpayment on a house to live in back here...the housing prices skyrocketed while I was gone).
As far as open space goes? In MA I had well over an acre of land, and there were only 5 houses on my cul-de-sac. Anything like that here would either a: be 60+ miles from anywhere you could reasonably work, or b: be 3-4 times what you can afford to pay for it. It's crazy...all this space, and the developers keep building the houses right next to each other (anything up to $350k within 30 miles of downtown Denver is going to be either small or crowded or both) to maximize their profits, or they charge *crazy* amounts of money for larger lots. One small town about 35 minutes from Denver had 3000 sf houses on
Arizona is a pretty cool state. If you want hot try Arkansas. We have high humidity! You don't notice heat at all. We get sticky and dirty just standing outside. (The real reason we look like hicks.) If you are looking for a state will wide open spaces and commutes of under 30 mins. Look at AR. We have Wal-mart, Dillards, Acxiom, and Alltel. Wal-mart has data centers that will make any slashdotter drool with envy. Acxiom already has all the data that government wants in the total information awareness. Alltel in small long distance/cell phone company, but they do almost all the financal industries outsourced processing. Dillards is a clothing store. Dillard's is a front line IBM test bed.
And that's it for the AR HR Marketing Dept.
Well, the case for putting industry in Arizona was compelling enough for Intel to migrate much of its operation to Arizona. Today, Intel is one of the biggest employers in the state of Arizona.
The prevalent attitude of "Why bother with Arizona when California is right next door?" is slowly dissipating. One advantage of Arizona over California is that we have a lower attrition rate for computer industry professionals. (One of the reasons Intel relocated much of its operation here had to do with the employment merry-go-round in Silicon Valley. One former Intel executive, who was one of the people leading the charge to move operations here, cited cases where Intel employees were job-hopping because of stupid things like being able to make a right-turn into the company parking lot instead of a left turn.)
Then again, the IT job market is really hurting right now in Arizona because of the economy, so there's very little employee churn right now.
One start-up company I worked at in Scottsdale, AZ, foundered about a year into my employment there. They were having quite a lot of trouble securing venture capital, and one excuse cited by the VCs we talked to (difficult to validate) was that we weren't headquartered in Silicon Valley. Apparently, the prevailing belief during the dot-com boom was that all the hot technology companies had to at least have a presence in Silicon Valley; if you weren't physically there, you couldn't possibly be that tech savvy. This is purely a perception issue.
Once the dot-com bubble burst, I think the overriding concern of cost drove a lot of people to reconsider their pro-Silicon Valley biases.
The sad thing is, my former employer, the start-up company I mentioned, relocated from Scottsdale, AZ, to San Jose, CA, just before the dot-com crash. Talk about bad timing. But at that point, nothing would have saved the company.
Moved down here in '92, never looked back. IBM, Cisco, SAS, Red Hat, Nortel, Ericsson, Glaxo (and a decent number of bio & tech startups) have a significant presence here. Having UNC, Duke, and NCSU less than 20 miles from each other doesn't hurt either. Business 2.0 recently christened this area as the Next Big Boom Town.
However...
..it will only be a boom town once there is an actual boom. And it isn't here (yet?).
The telecomm meltdown has caused a LOT of pain locally. (Did you notice the high incidence of telecomm equipment manufacturers in that list above? I know many many underemployed or unemployed software developers.) In anticipation, the Tragedy of the Commons is in full effect down here. The locals are cheerily turning North Raleigh (near I-540, which didn't exist 5 years ago) into an overpriced, suburban wasteland to handle the influx of the likes of you, since the local suburbs can't absorb you anymore. (Cary, NC had a population of about 7,000 forty years ago; now it's up to 100,000 -- and not because the natives take the phrase "bedroom community" to heart.)
My advice to you: the Triangle area is great, but our grass is no greener than yours. Should you show up here someday, well, welcome to beautiful North Carolina. Then go home!
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
I heard Sun was going to shut down its offices in Colorado. What is the State doing to grow jobs?
Cost of living isnt everything. The cost of living is high where I live, so I live with roomates and suddenly my rent is the same as yours. The only difference here is when raising children cost of living might begin to matter, but like I said Texas is not known for having good schools, or for being a place to raise doctors and lawyers. I'd choose Boston or even New York if I were trying to put my kid in the best schools or live in the best possible environment. Texas is cheap, so is Utah, Idaho, and many other places. The problem with cheap places, they usually don't have a very good learning environment. U.T. Austin may be a good school, how about your highschool system? What percentage of kids actually graduate with a diploma? What percentage of Texas is college educated? While Texas has no taxes, no taxes also means no education for the kids in public school.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo_t2 .htm
you can see the graduation rate for Texas on the list.
Basic cause and effect, if Texas can attract an educated population (usually this population has enough money to pay taxes), this brings jobs and the cost of living goes up.
You can't win, you bring snobby Harvard or Yale grads to your state and they'll raise your taxes and rent because they can afford the high cost of living and you cant.
Thats exactly what happens in New York, Boston, Cali, the elite basically take over and can afford the high taxes. Your option then becomes, be an elite or leave.
What I'm saying is, it works like a pyramid, the jobs don't go to where the cheapest cost of living is, the jobs go to the highest educated cheapest labor. Paying someone to work in Texas in the USA is going to cost almost exactly as much as to pay them to work in Silicon valley, it might be slightly less but unless you take a massive pay cut its not going to work. The only industry I know thats in Texas is the video game industry. Overall Texas while it could become an economic force, if it does become the economic force it will cease being Texas and will become another California, Massachusettes, New York, etc. Is this what you want?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.