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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.
India is the Best state for tech.
Is that the heat produced by your CPU is a dry heat.
(It's a joke, I lived there for 16 years.)
(site is cnn/msnbc/wapo dotted it seems)
They havn't seen anything yet.
Seriously though, we're not going to start saying "My site got cnn-dotted" are we?
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
Maybe it's an election year ploy. Think about it - MA on top, TX dropping hard... hmmm... Either that, or a precursor of things to come...
Massachusetts isn't dropping its suit against Mirosoft.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
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
With all those colleges in MA (including MIT), it's not surprising that it's the top state for technology. It's virtually a breading ground for it.
Good thing about Massachusetts:
MIT.
Bad thing about Massachusetts:
Ben Affleck & Matt Damon.
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.
State Rank(2004) Rank(2002) Rank Change Score(2004)
Massachusetts MA 1 1 0 84.35
California CA 2 3 1 78.86
Colorado CO 3 2 -1 78.77
Maryland MD 4 4 0 78.19
Virginia VA 5 5 0 72.27
Washington WA 6 6 0 69.87
New Jersey NJ 7 7 0 69.03
Minnesota MN 8 10 2 67.49
Utah UT 9 9 0 66.49
Connecticut CT 10 8 -2 66.26
Rhode Island RI 11 21 10 64.01
New Hampshire NH 12 13 1 63.43
Delaware DE 13 11 -2 62.51
New Mexico NM 14 20 6 61.75
New York NY 15 12 -3 60.66
Pennslyvania PA 16 16 0 60.36
Arizona AZ 17 18 1 58.47
Georgia GA 18 15 -3 58.10
Oregon OR 19 23 4 57.76
North Carolina NC 20 17 -3 57.28
Illinois IL 21 19 -2 56.59
Vermont VT 22 31 9 56.00
Texas TX 23 14 -9 54.91
Ohio OH 24 27 3 54.18
Michigan MI 25 24 -1 54.01
Kansas KS 26 22 -4 53.12
Wisconsin WI 27 25 -2 51.76
Nebraska NE 28 32 4 50.91
Indiana IN 29 30 1 50.73
Idaho ID 30 26 -4 49.03
Missouri MO 31 28 -3 48.11
Florida FL 32 29 -3 44.47
Maine ME 33 36 3 43.47
Tennessee TN 34 40 6 42.77
Oklahoma OK 35 37 2 42.65
Alabama AL 36 33 -3 42.36
Iowa IA 37 35 -2 41.90
Montana MT 38 34 -4 40.65
Hawaii HI 39 43 4 40.05
Alaska AK 40 39 -1 39.91
Wyoming WY 41 38 -3 38.72
Louisiana LA 42 44 2 36.66
Nevada NV 43 42 -1 36.09
South Carolina SC 44 41 -3 35.94
North Dakota ND 45 45 0 34.55
West Virginia WV 46 48 2 33.65
South Dakota SD 47 47 0 33.31
Kentucky KY 48 46 -2 32.61
Arkansas AR 49 50 1 29.53
Mississippi MS 50 49 -1 27.48
State Average 52.64
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!
Yes - it's that Michael Milken - the securities fraud guy.
in Texas
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Did anyone else notice the state that ranks last has the abbreviation MS?
_____
Thank you.
I lived in Massachusetts for 8 years and only set foot in the boston metro area 5 times. Boston isn't everything. Backwoods New England is VERY purty.
When you say "Arizona" for technology, you actually mean "Metro Phoenix." In the Phoenix area you certainly have plenty of "space" mostly occupied by roads and red tile roofs: my commute is over 25 miles one way, with an average rush-hour time of 40 minutes by freeway. I live in the north Valley (far-north Phoenix) compared to the "East Valley" where the orifice is. Mass-transit consists of two busses and a transfer, net time about two hours one-way (not counting a half-hour walk to the bus stop in 110F weather.)
Despite the north/east thing, I have a shorter commute than several cow-orkers who live in the East Valley because (a) they actually live farther out, and (b) the east-west rush hour traffic through Tempe, Chandler, Mesa, and Gilbert crawls on a good day.
Technology employment used to consist of Motorola, now it's Intel that employs more engineers than everyone else combined. They sack 10% of their staff every year.
Education consists of Arizona State University, with 60,000 students who all commute and haven't any other schools to choose from: ASU knows that and treats them as nothing but revenue sources. The only requirement for tenure is hitting your quota of grant money. This might matter more if students ever saw a professor, but they have better things to do, like fill out grant applications.
Oh, and the only "open spaces" any of us see are when SR101 takes us past the Salt River Reservation (cotton fields, whiteflies that gum up your windshield) or SR202 takes us along the (dry) Salt River bed. Otherwise, it's a pretty fair drive to get out of town.
Don't forget those 110F summer days; it was 97F yesterday (late March). I happen to love the heat, but partly because I grew up here and partly because it keeps the riffraff locked up in air-conditioned denial. Yes, you can see mountains when the air clears. Just don't kid yourself that you'll be able to live in those "open spaces" and still work for Intel; even Craig Barrett has to fly to Montana for that.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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?
If we are talking about cost of living being the determining factor like the poster of the article says, well then India is the best place along with China.
In the USA Texas would not be the best place because theres places with an even lower cost of living and plenty of open space.
The best state for tech is the state with the best economy, most educated population and the most money. That state happens to be Mass due to MIT, Harvard, Tufts, and the many other great schools here of course we'd have the advantage over Texas.
What great schools are there in Texas? Also places with lower costs of living usually also have a population which generally has less wealth which explains why they live in poor areas where the cost of living is low. If you run a business you want to be where the other businesses are. When businesses move to a place the cost of living eventually goes up and if Texas had become Silicon valley do you honestly think a bunch of poor people would be living there? The cost of living would skyrocket to the levels of Cali or Boston.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
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?
It's probably better to move the call centers to India rather than MS/AR/KY. On average, Indians speak better English.
Here are a few reasons why Boston is a great place to work for techies:
1. Get to work with smart, old grizzled veterans. They have taught me a few things about discipline, engineering and adaptation. Having a mentor has been invaluable in my career experience.
2. The girls here are hot, and for the girls there are a lot of very fine and eligible bachelors for are actually nice - sometimes too nice for their own good. This place is like "Logan's Run". It seems like nobody is older than 25 at times.
3. You can walk and bike anywhere. Everything is so close. I don't own a car.
4. Compare to New York, you got nature basically right in your backyard - Blue Hills is a 6,000 acre reserve that's 5 miles from downtown Boston.
5. Great, thriving geek culture and community. I never miss the 6.270 autonomous robotic contest at MIT, for example, or the fact that you can take holography classes in adult education schools.
6. Energetic, creative nightlife. If you're into bars, clubs and dancing, it's here. But if you are into performance art, experimental music, hacking groups, murder mysteries or pot luck dinners w/strangers, they are here also.
There's a lot more. Of course there are problems with the city too, but I think the good outweighs the bad.
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
Psst: the Big Dig ended.
:)
I know MA taxes are higher than, say FL, where I grew up. But I'm afraid the "Taxachussetts" moniker may be more mythical than you realize.
MA: 5% income tax, 5% sales tax
CA: 9.30% income tax, 6% sales tax
Like I said in another post, it may have something to do with "Taxifornia" sounding so odd
But, to each his own -- I don't put much faith or stock in this study, but I know I'm happy (and very gainfully employed, with lots of local oppotunities should I want to change jobs) in MA.
everything in moderation
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.
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.
"The only industry I know thats in Texas is the video game industry."
That's because you are stupid.
Massachusets has less people in it than Houston does.
Texas has Austin, Houston, and Dallas/Ft Worth, which all have significant tech corridors producing a hell of a lot more than video games.
The University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and Rice University are all superb schools, and depending on what subject you are talking about, everybit as good in some cases as your vaunted ivy league schools (oops, Rice IS an Ivy League school).
Can't reference your stats for you, but I can tell you that there isn't Jack for jobs here.
Denver (tech center) and CO Springs have some jobs right now, but they are few and far between. Longmont, Fort Collins, Greeley, etc... are absolutely dead. There aren't any tech jobs here right now at all. Not sure how we were number 2 last year and number 3 this year.
Find coupons in Greeley
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You'd do well to back up some of those "traditional Mass-bashing" with some current stats.
.5 acre in Natick (15 in from Boston) for $370k. $1M+ for similar in CA.
High Taxes (income, property, real estate, car, excise).
MA income tax is 5%. California's is 9.3%.
MA sales tax is 5%. CA is 6%. MA property tax is average 1-2% (mine is 1.232 in Natick). CA is 3%. Car taxes are much higher in CA (don't have number, but neither did you, and I lived in both). Excise is town-specific and easy to avoid.
Lots of gubmint interference
Where in the US isn't there? This is meaningless.
High fees for lic, reg, insurance, title, etc. etc.
It was cheaper by 3x to buy, reg, and license my car in MA than CA. Look it up.
PITA to own a gun for self defense.
PITA if you're a felon. Yeah. So?
Outrageous cost of housing
Only valid point -- but why is housing expensive? Because it's a good place to live -- the market couldn't bear the prices if people wouldn't pay it. I just bought a nice 3BR on
6 months of winter, and the roads are salted so your car will rot out (sheds tear for his decapitated but loved car)
4 months of winter, and some of us like not sweating anytime we're outside. Skiing is nice. And you can always put on a jacket. Back in AZ or FL or even So. CA -- you can only take off so much clothing before you get arrested. And if you have a job, you can't stay in the pool all day. Nice places to vacation, since you can spend it in the water, but I hated living there. To each his own, I guess.
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)
Nice anecdote -- I'm sure nothing like that has ever happened anywhere else. Never any race riots in CA, always in MA, right?
The RMV is staffed by people who actively enjoy being rude and hateful.
This, my friend, is universal.
everything in moderation
My point is that Texas has the 2nd largest economy in the Union (behind California), the 2nd largest population (also behind California), and we actually have a pretty damn diverse economy as well, so someone saying something along the lines of "what's in Texas besides video game companies" is pretty damn ignorant.
Massachusetts consists (economically) mostly of the Boston metropolitan area, which also includes the south of New Hampshire. Things don't look so rosy business-wise in the western part of the state, but it doesn't affect the average for the state all that much. (as opposed to e.g. California or Texas, where any averages are going to include a lot of farmers and oilmen, kind of bringing down the tech index)
Lots of people on this thread have talked about cost of living and whatnot, but let's face it - if you're starting a new company, you want to locate where you can steal someone else's employees without their needing to move. And if you work for a little startup company, you sure as hell don't want to have to sell your house if they go under or turn weird and you have to jump ship. All of which means, if you want to work for a hot company, your cost of living is going to suck. Such is life - when engineers are expensive, houses tend to be expensive as well.
Which sort of leads into another point - I think that Boston, and Massachusetts in general, is a center of technology just because it is. It's not just because of the universities - there are other places (Amherst/Northampton, for one) with even higher concentrations of college students, who leave as fast as they can after graduation. Boston (or 128/495/whatever) is a good place to start a company because you can find people who started companies, and you can find them because it was a good place to start a company a few years ago.
I think the thing about Bostonians is not rudeness per se, but a kind of manic pace. Researchers a few years back compared American cities by things like how quickly people talk, the amount of time transactions took to complete at sales counters, how often people interrupt each other, etc. Boston was by far the fastest paced city in the US.
This pretty much bears out my experience. Bostonians are always rushing around, with their mind on the next place their going to be. We don't spare any time for things like making eye contact and polite conversation with strangers,and people who do are probably immediately suspect of being muggers or con-men.
One thing that constantly struck me when I started to do business in other parts of the country is how long people take to get to the point. Of course, this may mean by standards of other parts of the country Bostonians are rude, but the converse is also true: Bostonians consider wasting peoples time as rude. Is this any way to live? I don't know, it seems natural to me. It's just a difference in cultural norms, like the way different cultures have different norms about the appropriate distance to stand from another person when having a conversation. Cities have different norms as to how much beating around the bush is enough to express polite human interest in another person; Boston is on one end of the bell curve, and certain southern cities are on the other. When it comes to more fundamental things like true consideration for others, Bostonians not worse than residents of most other cities, and better than some.
Speaking of bum raps, New Yorkers have a reputation for rudeness that in my experience is totally undeservered. Despite what you see in the movies I've found New Yorkers to be far and away the most helpful and genuinely friendly big city dwellers I've ever encountered. Perhaps their reputation for rudeness has some part in this, because many New Yorkers seem to be almost consciously acting as civic ambassadors.
As far as the Mass RMV is concerned, it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be. It used to be so grossly understaffed and training levels were so low that the people working there had an attitude that making an effort made no difference so why bother? I can attest to this myself having seen examples of amazing incompetence and indifference personally. However RMV went through major reorganization that included increasing staffing, and improving training, systemizing customer service, and expanding regional offices so people don't have to travel as far to get service. Since the 90's my personal experience with RMV is that it is quick, efficient and friendly.
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