Tech Workers Think Silicon Valley and Startups Are Losing Their Luster (qz.com)

An anonymous reader shares a Quartz report: The job site Indeed.com found Silicon Valley's hold on tech workers is slipping as opportunities, and the cost of living, changes the equation for living and working in one of the priciest places in the country. "There is more opportunity for tech professionals in more places than ever before," wrote Terence Chiu, vice president of Indeed Prime by email, citing cities such as Austin, Boston, Seattle, and New York City. "Obviously the San Francisco Bay remains the largest tech hub [but] what has made it so attractive has also made it expensive." Indeed's most recent survey of professional tech workers found more than 66% of tech workers say living and working in Silicon Valley is either "not that important" or "not at all important" for a career in technology. Just 12% consider it "very important." Opinions were split on generational lines. About half of millennial tech workers say it's important (26.5%) or very important (19%), but the number declined to 10.2% among the Boomer generation. "Seasoned talent is often searching for opportunity elsewhere," stated the report. New employees may see the high cost of living as an acceptable tradeoff for building up a reputation and experience in the Bay Area, but that seems to fade over time.Recently, Google co-founder Sergey Brin advised people to not come to Silicon Valley to start a business for the very same reasons.

Comments

Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Fire_Wraith]

When you're fresh out of college, cost of living really isn't on your mind, or at least it wasn't for me. I wanted to live in the area where I knew there were all the things I wanted, from food to entertainment to job opportunities. Fast forward a bit, and I realized that the area I was in was ridiculously expensive for no good reason, had insane traffic that would never get better, and that I could get 90-95% of the things I wanted in a far, far cheaper area, cutting my housing costs all but in half.

It should be no surprise that the older people get, the less they're willing to put up with the kind of things you have to suffer through in the SF Bay area. Living 4 to an apartment is fine in your early 20s, but when you get older, you want a place of your own, nevermind the space to have a family.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[drinkypoo]

Thing is, these companies don't want to hire anyone over thirty anyway. So really, it makes sense for them to stay in expensive places that adults want to move away from.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. My ex-team lead moved out there from Metro-Atlanta a couple of years ago. His salary was doubled and he jumped at it.

He said he should have demanded a four-fold increase to keep his standard of living.

He's looking for another job and even thinking of coming back.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

I had that happen a while back. An offer in the Bay Area, went, interviewed, got an offer, then looked around at how much a place within a commute distance was, and walked away from it. I knew something was fishy when there were a few employees were living in vans in the parking lot.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Big Hairy Ian]

Surely by now with cloud computing & remoting Silicon valley is just massively expensive piece of real-estate that nobody actually that bothered about anymore.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Drethon]

Thing is, these companies don't want to hire anyone over thirty anyway. So really, it makes sense for them to stay in expensive places that adults want to move away from.

Probably explains why so many startups struggle to profit. Their workers don't have the experience to tell the non-technical entrepreneur they are an idiot.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be no surprise that the older people get, the less they're willing to put up with the kind of things you have to suffer through in the SF Bay area. Living 4 to an apartment is fine in your early 20s, but when you get older, you want a place of your own, nevermind the space to have a family.

Even in my 20's I didn't find that sort of arrangement appealing. Maybe it's because I grew up always having my own bedroom and commuted to college rather than living in a dorm. I didn't even like sharing a tent very much while camping in the boy scouts. Different people value their personal space to differing degrees.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years back the company I worked for closed the satellite office I worked out of and gave me an offer to move to the main office in the bay area. It would have come with a 15K a year pay raise, when calculating cost of living it would have needed to be closer to a 50K a year pay raise to maintain my standard of living. Yeah, passed on that one as well. Sad part is, I only make slightly less than that 50K a year more now, and still live in a much cheaper market, and that company was so damn cheap I doubt I'd be making as much as I do now even living in the bay area.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[__aaclcg7560]

[...] had insane traffic that would never get better [...]

The only time traffic ever got better in Silicon Valley was when a million people moved out of Silicon Valley after the Dot Com Bust in 2001. That lasted a few years. Saw a similar dip in traffic after the Great Recession in 2009 and 2010, where half my apartment complex stood empty and the leasing office forego its annual rent increases. These days I take the express bus into work to avoid the traffic hassle by paying someone else to drive.

Re: Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps if you had gone halvsies with one of the van squatters you could've made it work?

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[__aaclcg7560]

Maybe it's because I grew up always having my own bedroom and commuted to college rather than living in a dorm.

I shared a five-bedroom Victorian (a former frat house) near San Jose State University with 12 other guys in the mid-1990's. Rent was $200 per person. We were forced to move out after the city implemented a three trash can limit per household (we were putting out seven trash cans) and residential dumpster service was expensive as hell. Last guy to move in had the job of calling up the landlord to explain that the guys who rented the place a decade ago were long gone. If you can live in those conditions, you can live in any conditions.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[TheGratefulNet]

no one listens to 'workers'. the execs are full of ego and can do no wrong.

what they all have gotton used to: hiring a bunch of chair-warmers who are almost universally from south east asia, h1b mostly, and all are young. the exact formula for 'dont make waves, dont challenge the boss'.

the bosses are not used to hearing anyone voice opinions! we have the worst engineering now, walking the hallways of cisco, intel, you name it. they hire 'to a price' and you get monkeys if you pay peanuts.

they go out of their way to hire 'diversity' but that means NOT hiring the real minority, the US-born person who is over 35 and HAS the experience.

silicon valley is a sweatshop, becoming more like what we had 100 years ago when the US finally got fed up and 'did the union thing'. that changed history. things got better for a while.

now, they're back to being company-owned - the world, that is. people don't matter. companies do. and you just better do what you are told. there are 1000 more indians waiting to take your job, here or elsewhere, if you dare say 'no' to a boss.

similarly, raise issues of safety or product design and you won't be continuing there much longer (personal experience on that one).

fuck sillicon valley. it stopped being a place of innovation when it became a place to concentrate chair-sitters from across the world. quantity is all that matters. do we have 'body count'? did we save a lot on it? then we're good (that's how they think).

if you are young, sure, come here. but you won't be able to stay long-term. just be aware of that. and be aware of the fact that companies laugh behind your back when you are gullible enough to believe this 'loyalty' shit they want you to swallow. don't believe it, though. eventually YOU will be replace by someone even cheaper. my years are numbered, but then again, so are yours.

no one is safe in the bay area, job-wise. it stinks here.

love the weather and the culture (well, the old culture, that some people still remember). but the days of the 'hp garage' is long gone. now, its stupid social bullshit, twits and disgracebook lead the pack. ie, no product at all, just hot air and advertising.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

"gotton"? I think I have a shirt made of that stuff.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

But don't you miss the smell of urine and feces in your SF doorway?

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Joe_Dragon]

they also want people to dumb to know that they are being ripped off with the 60-80 hour work weeks with no OT.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[King_TJ]

Yep! I know this might come across as a "slam" against younger workers -- but I agree without meaning it that way.

Younger I.T. workers bring a lot of things to the table, but a rich experience working with older technologies is not typically one of them. I see a lot of "re-inventing the wheel" going on with new web-based services many startups keep trying to launch. Sometimes they're a success, but a lot of older people in I.T. look at the stuff and just shake our heads. We've seen other ways the same thing has been implemented before, and can't see why it's worth all that money to rehash it with a pretty new web front-end.

I deal with this all the time with supporting a lot of younger professionals in marketing and creative work. They're always struggling to figure out ways to get very large files transferred to clients, when the attachments are too big to email. They resort to paid web services that aren't all that reliable, and then we field dozens of support tickets asking why someone can't get a download to start when they click the link, or why they were never emailed the invite to get the file.... on and on. All along, we had a secure FTP server set up which gets the job done quickly and reliably. But it's a battle to convince them that the person on the other side really *can* install a free FTP client easily and successfully log in to grab the needed files.

Almost every time we get that process going though? Everyone involved loves it and there's no more heartburn about getting files to or from that client. Whaddya know? Sometimes the decades old solution still works the best!

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[ubrgeek]

> the execs are full of ego and can do no wrong.

I remember one dot-com where I was GM. We were waiting for a meeting to start when the CEO came in and sat down. A minute later the CFO came in and sat down next to him. Finally the CTO came in and sat down next to the CFO. Our lead engineer turns to me and says, "And so, the cluster forms." Funniest damn thing I had heard all day.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[fluffernutter]

To me it's all about my quality of living. If I have to work more hours, my cost goes up, housing expensive my cost goes up. If you're not going to end up with a better life in the end what's the point.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

> hiring a bunch of chair-warmers who are almost universally from south east asia, h1b mostly, and all are young.

This is a rant and a hugely biased one at that. And they are not at all from south east asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.) -- you are thinking South Asia (India).

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Drethon]

Yep, new perspectives are just as valuable as old perspectives but sometimes a problem isn't a matter of technology but engineering that has existed for some time.

Re: Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[fluffernutter]

Maybe one of them had a Pinto out back he could rent.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[NotAPK]

Go one step further, make it even easier and open up some temporary slush folders on your website. Simple HTTP auth can be set to protect sensitive files. As easy as clicking a link. Manually delete within the week, or set a scheduled task/cron job to clean up any files more than a week old. Anyway, it's what we do.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[mlts]

It can be odd how places hire. Last year, I had a job interview with a firm where the skinny jeans, white earbuds, full beard and the shaved side haircut was pretty much the standard with everyone in the building. When the interviewer asked me when I was going to grow a full mane to fit in to their team, I knew that my chances of getting the job was nil... so, my response was "because gas masks don't seal over facial hair."

Some tech companies hire on things nothing related to actual competency.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[NotAPK]

And it would have been fantastic!

Good times. Nothing like getting a skip delivered to the front lawn to "move out" of a share house. Every single thing got junked and we just walked away....crazy.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Most web browsers or OSs will handle an ftp transfer just fine, without the need to install anything new. You can even send a URL by email that will prompt them for a password if you don't want to put a file in a publicly accessible place: ftp://ftp.example.com/file.zip

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

That was ftp://user@ftp.example.com/file.zip before slashdot helpfully linkified it and dropped the user@ portion.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Natales]

Mod parent up. I've seen *exactly* the same you point to virtually everywhere. But one thing I'd like to add is the perspective of the "startup", not only the large companies. They are great in luring you with big promises and massive amounts of stock options while offering crappy salaries. This also unfavorably caters to the young who can afford the gamble, and who are too naive to understand the downsides. They are not necessarily in the H1B game, but their way to keep you "at bay" is with their "at will" contracts, where a CEO can just fire you for no reason. HR is a third party outsourced company.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[__aaclcg7560]

Every single thing got junked and we just walked away....crazy.

Roommates and I moved out a triplex that we rented for six years. We decided to junk everything. So I ordered a large dumpster to be delivered in the back alley. A homeless person came by, lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the fully loaded dumpster. That went up in smoke. We didn't have to worry about leveling off the top since the fire reduced everything down to two feet of ash.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Grishnakh]

but the days of the 'hp garage' is long gone. now, its stupid social bullshit, twits and disgracebook lead the pack. ie, no product at all, just hot air and advertising.

It seems that the primary industry of the USA these days has become advertising, rather than anything useful.

Very sad.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[imgod2u]

Convincing people to have to download a client to download a file is kinda cumbersome. That's a legitimate complaint. I see a lot of "seasoned IT workers" posting about how these young kids just want to re-invent the wheel and don't know about .

FTP has a lot of flaws when it comes to modern, high-volume file-sharing. It's either password based (insecure) or RSA based (cumbersome for one-off file sharing). While it doesn't necessarily require a client (most web browsers support sftp) you need to send a link to your server to share a file (unless you setup a link proxy, which the person sending the file has to generate every time). That invites both phishing and DDoS.

This is why things like Attache and various other, encrypted, 2-step verified sharing services exist.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[m00sh]

no one listens to 'workers'. the execs are full of ego and can do no wrong.

what they all have gotton used to: hiring a bunch of chair-warmers who are almost universally from south east asia, h1b mostly, and all are young. the exact formula for 'dont make waves, dont challenge the boss'.

the bosses are not used to hearing anyone voice opinions! we have the worst engineering now, walking the hallways of cisco, intel, you name it. they hire 'to a price' and you get monkeys if you pay peanuts.

they go out of their way to hire 'diversity' but that means NOT hiring the real minority, the US-born person who is over 35 and HAS the experience.

silicon valley is a sweatshop, becoming more like what we had 100 years ago when the US finally got fed up and 'did the union thing'. that changed history. things got better for a while.

now, they're back to being company-owned - the world, that is. people don't matter. companies do. and you just better do what you are told. there are 1000 more indians waiting to take your job, here or elsewhere, if you dare say 'no' to a boss.

similarly, raise issues of safety or product design and you won't be continuing there much longer (personal experience on that one).

fuck sillicon valley. it stopped being a place of innovation when it became a place to concentrate chair-sitters from across the world. quantity is all that matters. do we have 'body count'? did we save a lot on it? then we're good (that's how they think).

if you are young, sure, come here. but you won't be able to stay long-term. just be aware of that. and be aware of the fact that companies laugh behind your back when you are gullible enough to believe this 'loyalty' shit they want you to swallow. don't believe it, though. eventually YOU will be replace by someone even cheaper. my years are numbered, but then again, so are yours.

no one is safe in the bay area, job-wise. it stinks here.

love the weather and the culture (well, the old culture, that some people still remember). but the days of the 'hp garage' is long gone. now, its stupid social bullshit, twits and disgracebook lead the pack. ie, no product at all, just hot air and advertising.

The young complain that everyone wants experience. The old complain they only hire the young.

The execs says nobody tells them anything and the workers say nobody listens to them.

US workers say H1Bs are undercutting them. H1Bs says the enormous cost and complications of the H1Bs gets them stuck in undesirable low-paying jobs.

The white guys say minorities and women are being preferred for diversity. Minorities and women complain that they have no connections and no way to even get into jobs.

My point is that it's hard for everyone and everyone faces unique challenges. Nobody has it easy. Let's figure out how to get what we want out of life rather than blaming everyone else for why we are not getting what we want.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Grishnakh]

I was similar: I always had my own bedroom, and frequently even had my own tent in boy scouts. I lived in a dorm, however, but even here I ended up buying out my room half the time and living by myself, which was a great situation: it's too bad I wasn't good at hooking up with girls at the time, but otherwise it was great being right there on campus, having friends right down the hall, but not having to share a room.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. I interviewed about 3 years ago for a position in New York City - advertising startup with some seriously impressive performance and talent, working with the team that was working on building a real-time ad auction system. Very cool shit.

Here's the rub: they offered to pay me the same as I was already making in suburban New Hampshire (plus heaps of stock options), but I'd have to relocate to NYC area, and work in the flatiron district.

I turned it down, because at the time I was 37 - I had a cozy 1400 sq ft place with a pool in a quiet neighborhood that cost me 1100 a month, 7 minutes from work, with good pay. If this job offer had come in 12 years before, when I was 25, I would have jumped at the chance - the idea of living in a shared apartment in some hip NYC neighborhood and working crazy startup hours wouldn't have mattered to me then - I would have been able to go out and have a hell of a time any night of the week, and enjoy a completely different lifestyle. But the idea of leaving what I had already in NH for a 200 sq foot coffin that'd cost me 2000 a month and have a 40 minute subway commute every day... that just sounded shitty. I asked if they'd reconsider and let me work remote, but they were adamant that I had to work in their office. So I passed.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be that some of those parties are compulsive liars. I'm pretty much past believing in the "stupidity" half of Hanlon's razor.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[AuMatar]

That was what is known in colloquial circles as "a joke". The interviewer didn't literally want you to grow a beard, he was trying to make light conversation to prevent things from being awkward and build rapport. You didn't lose the job because of lack of a beard, you lot it because you either flubbed the interview or you acted like an asshole in response to said joke.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[ShanghaiBill]

they also want people to dumb to know that they are being ripped off with the 60-80 hour work weeks with no OT.

They are not doing it because they are "dumb". They are doing it because they are making $125k/yr plus stock options.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[__aaclcg7560]

Some tech companies hire on things nothing related to actual competency.

Robert Half sent me to biotech firm to interview for a tech position, told me to dress up a suit. I sat in the empty lobby for 90 minutes, watching people go on by and fielding phone calls from the recruiter asking where the hell I was. Someone that I've seen several times walked through the lobby asked me who I was and he introduced himself as the IT manager. After the interview, I met the CEO who was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans. Everyone, including the passing scientists in white coats, thought I was a venture capitalist making an unannounced visit.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[drinkypoo]

The young complain that everyone wants experience. The old complain they only hire the young.

End result, they hire young liars.

The execs says nobody tells them anything and the workers say nobody listens to them.

Nobody wastes their time telling execs anything if they don't listen to workers. I've talked to an exec before and had good results. I've also talked to an exec and essentially been told to fuck off about six months before the company folded and proved me right — apparently he was in on the scam. He got his final paycheck, and I (along with most others) didn't, so that backs that up pretty solidly. I've been ignored more than listened to, though.

US workers say H1Bs are undercutting them. H1Bs says the enormous cost and complications of the H1Bs gets them stuck in undesirable low-paying jobs.

And yet, both things are true. There's no conflict there at all.

The white guys say minorities and women are being preferred for diversity. Minorities and women complain that they have no connections and no way to even get into jobs.

The truth is that those job requirements are designed to disqualify everyone who is not a H1B who can be treated like a slave.

My point is that it's hard for everyone and everyone faces unique challenges. Nobody has it easy. Let's figure out how to get what we want out of life rather than blaming everyone else for why we are not getting what we want.

The fact is that a tiny percentage of the population holds the vast majority of the wealth, and they are not spending it. If they were, the rest of us would have money, because it's the "little people" at the bottom who have to act in order to make things happen. We need to take steps to force them to spend their money, and not just by shuffling it around between corporations that they (or their cronies) control.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[__aaclcg7560]

That was ftp://ftp.example.com/file.zip [example.com] before slashdot helpfully linkified it and dropped the user@ portion.

File a support ticket.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[__aaclcg7560]

they also want people to dumb to know that they are being ripped off with the 60-80 hour work weeks with no OT.

My IT support contracts for the last 10+ years state that I'm prohibited from working more than 40 hours per week. No one wants to pay overtime. If I want to work more hours, I need to get a weekend job.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in 4 bedroom house that also had the back porch, dining room, and sun room converted to rooms for 6 rooms with seven people. The closets in each room are converted to bathrooms with showers except two that share a common BR. The shed out back was converted to 4 BRs with a shared kitchen (no living room). The garage has a room, but not fully converted or used. The barn out back is used by the local turkey vultures to raise their young along with the ground hogs and stray cats. The recently termit infested house was redone by covering all the rotted wood with siding and drywall to make another three BRs with shared kitchen and living room. All of these buildings are from the 1930's/40's.

Why are we here? Well, all the utilities including dish TV and internet are paid for by the landlord for $450/mo each vs. paying $1500/mo for a studio apartment with restrictions and constant rent increases (ours hasn't changed for years). Some work from home in this house. Work is about 2-3 miles for us. The Chinese and thai restaurant about two blocks away are rented to these tenants by our landlord. We are here because its cheap and nobody wants to spend 3 hours driving 20 miles to get here one way. So most have families in other states (not just the neighboring states) because this is where the job is at but commute home on weekends. some are here because they are students getting trained, others are retired and getting a 2nd paycheck or are waiting for retirement, some run a biz such as the thai restaurant lady, some are from other countries being trained here (not h1bs) and are saving some of the money their governments pay to send home, some a just passing through, and the remaining a military on temp assignment.

Do we like it? No, since there is no place to put friends and family up if they visit. But we put up with it because of the housing and rental cost, and commute time.
This isn't LA, NYC, Boston, but in the VA and MD area because DC is the main employer here.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[ShanghaiBill]

Surely by now with cloud computing & remoting Silicon valley is just massively expensive piece of real-estate that nobody actually that bothered about anymore.

I have worked for several companies where everyone worked from home. They were all dysfunctional and ultimately failed. Letting workers telecommute one or two days a week can work okay if it is managed carefully. But go for weeks or months at a time without meeting face-to-face, and you will have major miscommunications, people working toward different objectives, and high turnover. If you propose a major change using a whiteboard in a meeting room, you can see the lead programmer cross his arms and furrow his brow, and know that he needs more convincing, or maybe the proposal is flawed. You can't see that if he is at the other end of a chat session.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[TWX]

By now?

In the 1980s my father had a GRID laptop assigned to him. He'd work from home on the System 370 or would use it when on-call and something would come up, dialing-in to the S370 via modem.

I have a serial terminal sitting on my desk at work plugged into a network switch's serial port. I can administer the entire WAN through that terminal if I have to, no actual computer involved. I could take that terminal and hook it directly to a modem with a null-modem cable and dial-out to connect to other computers, which is basically late-sixties to early-seventies technology.

Since the dawn of the modem it's been possible to work from somewhere else if the software to do the work is capable of being used remotely. It's only the early GUI era when this broke as GUI applications required too much bandwidth to work over modem speeds. VPN and broadband Internet in the mid to late nineties essentially solved that, tech workers that don't physically touch the equipment could literally live anywhere.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[ShanghaiBill]

We were forced to move out after the city implemented a three trash can limit per household

Solution: Take your trash with you to work. Throw it in the company dumpster. Make sure you clear this with that management, but they shouldn't object to one or two bags per week. I did this for years when I moved to the valley, since I was living in my van.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[HornWumpus]

At that level, you don't 'spend' money, you 'invest' it. Otherwise inflation will eat it.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[drinkypoo]

At that level, you don't 'spend' money, you 'invest' it. Otherwise inflation will eat it.

Or you park it in an overseas tax haven where it only benefits criminals laundering their money, so that you don't have to pay taxes on it.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[__aaclcg7560]

Solution: Take your trash with you to work.

We were college students. Most of us didn't have jobs. It was easier to split the household into three smaller households.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[HornWumpus]

It's still invested. Just overseas and with earnings unreported.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Recognizing the URL, but dropping user@ requires extra logic, so they probably did it on purpose to prevent people from inadvertently leaking account details. You can force it by typing your own markup, so it's not that big of a deal anyway.

TLDR; Meh.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[__aaclcg7560]

Never mind that the GP complained about users opening support tickets for broken links. Swoosh!

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

they also want people to dumb to know that they are being ripped off with the 60-80 hour work weeks with no OT.

They are not doing it because they are "dumb". They are doing it because they are making $125k/yr plus stock options.

And not only are they actually making less per hour than people working elsewhere but they don't have any free time to spent that money.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Joe_Dragon]

free FTP client? I think IE can do FTP so it's not that hard even in locked down systems where it's a big deal to get IT to install even a free FTP software.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

That's why Hitler had such a short mustache lol

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

" Have you tried turning it off and on again? Uh... okay, well, the button on the side, is it glowing? Yeah, you need to turn it on... uh, the button turns it on... yeah, you do know how a button works don't you? No, not on clothes."

Re: Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe there are just so few "top jobs". As a graphics programmer the top jobs are the ones where you get to design an application or rendering engine from scratch. Those are usually only given to friends of the directors. Other jobs are either bug fixing, middleware programming get or porting. If Agile gets involved then a few jobs don't involve any programming at all like the architect/project manager positions. So then it becomes a very narrow path maintaining the seniority to remain in programming but not become trapped in paperwork.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[The-Ixian]

Robert Half

That's your problem right there.

Re: Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox can do ftp links.

I would prefer to use ssjfs. That allows a file system to be accesses through the ssh network link.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

That barely covers cost of living here and the options are almost always worthless. So, working 60-80 a week just to barely scrape by is kinda dumb.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

As I spent more than a decade in SF bay, I can't agree more, just a sad truth I am not welling to confront. Guess what, I am in the group you are talking about: age over 35. The preference in the valley is either you are young or you are part of cheap/low-class labor pool..

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[kevingnet]

You're sure of this, right?

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

they also want people to dumb to know that they are being ripped off with the 60-80 hour work weeks with no OT.

They are not doing it because they are "dumb". They are doing it because they are making $125k/yr plus stock options.

Not being able to divide 125k by 60 or 80 and then multiple the result by 40 is what makes them dumb.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[lgw]

The fact is that a tiny percentage of the population holds the vast majority of the wealth, and they are not spending it.

Wealth is not money; money is not wealth. If you had an even share of all the stock in all the publicly held corporations in the US, it would pay about $1k/year in dividends. Yay? You can't "spend" wealth. You can sell it, at which point you no longer have wealth, and presumably as everyone starts doing that it ends up concentrated in the hands of just a few people again (though it might take a while).

The fact is, the majority of Americans are stockholders, and the median American retires with a reasonable chunk of wealth that she then sells off gradually to live on during that retirement.

Maybe you meant something other than "wealth"? But I can't guess what that would be.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure about that. I've been working in Silicon valley for past 16 years, and it's no better or worse than working in most other areas in the country. One thing different is that tech jobs will pay significantly more in silicon valley. As for housing cost, yes it's higher, it's possible to get reasonable cost housing in places like Tracy. Yes Tracy is pretty distant from heart of Silicon valley and commuting by car would be a hell. But it's also possible to commute from there to Silicon Valley from Tracy using public transit like ace-rail. Overall, I would still say it's been well worth it financially to live and work in Silicon valley, as long as you are willing to put up with long commutes on trains.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[cthulhu11]

I think that's really part of it, like the growing shift to contractors -- as a way around the illegality of explicitly discriminating against people supporting families.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[cthulhu11]

Multiple spot-on insights here. Also add: o Escalating shift of work to contractors, which degrades job stability and discriminates against people with families o Policies against both promotions and even yearly raises to keep even with inflation Some years I marveled to read that the average job longevity in the silly valley is 18 months. I know understand why.

Re:Cost of Living Tradeoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Swoosh!

Just do it?

corporate fanboyism

[Anonymous Coward]

The real issue is, you get a lot of new college grads who have a hard on for particular companies, be it Google, or whatever and they want to go and work for X company and are willing to take a pay cut for it.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[Anonymous Coward]

The college grads I know want to work for a company so they can draw a paycheck. Google and such are nice, but the chance at working there is about as much as having one's garage band get picked up by a record label and promoed in the mainstream.

One needs to remember -- 40% of tech jobs dropped off the face of the earth when it comes to recruitment ads. There is a recession coming at us full steam.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[__aaclcg7560]

There is a recession coming at us full steam.

I've been hearing that for the last several years. God knows that The Wall Street Journal has ran enough scare articles to sell papers (i.e., if it doesn't bleed to lead, make it bleed and bleed some more). No evidence yet of an imminent recession. If anything, we overdue for a serious stock market correction.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[tcopeland]

> No evidence yet of an imminent recession

It does seem like the market will continue to inflate as long as the Fed continues to keep the interest rates at zero.

That certainly is tough on people on a fixed income or even just hoping for some return on a passbook savings account.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[LynnwoodRooster]

If we used the same inflation metric as back in the 1970s and 1980s we'd still be officially in a recession - since 2006. And if you look at the stock market and correct for the 70s/80s inflation metric, you'd see it's basically flat since 2007 as well. We're "doing well" in the stock simply because of the massive influx of cash from the Federal Reserve, and it's papered over as "good" by fudging the inflation and unemployment numbers.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[__aaclcg7560]

It does seem like the market will continue to inflate as long as the Fed continues to keep the interest rates at zero.

You're not current on Fed policy. If the Feds can get away with it, they want to raise interest rates by a quarter-percentage four times a year. The first interest rate increase was December 2015 — and the financial world didn't come to a cataclysmic end. Financial data and political events cancelled interest rate hikes so far this year. September looks like a possible go for an interest rate hike.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[tcopeland]

Perhaps they will.

The 10 year chart is pretty damning though:

http://www.tradingeconomics.co...

That's a lot of free money floating around.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[__aaclcg7560]

If we used the same inflation metric as back in the 1970s and 1980s we'd still be officially in a recession - since 2006

The traditional definition of a recession is a decline in GDP for two consecutive quarters. That haven't happened since the Great Recession ended in 2009.

We're "doing well" in the stock simply because of the massive influx of cash from the Federal Reserve, and it's papered over as "good" by fudging the inflation and unemployment numbers.

The Feds ended quantitative easing and raised interest rates in 2015. September is looking like a go for raising interest rates again. Easy money is on the way out.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[LynnwoodRooster]

Fudge inflation numbers (artificially calculate them as low - like we're doing relative to the 1980 metric) and the GDP will rise. Inflation factors in to the nominal GDP, and understating inflation will cause the nominal GDP to overstated.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[myNameIsNotImportant]

> Financial data and political events cancelled interest rate hikes so far this year. September looks like a possible go for an interest rate hike.

I'm not sure I would consider 6% likelihood of a raise in september a significant possibility.

http://www.cmegroup.com/tradin...

Re:corporate fanboyism

[__aaclcg7560]

I'm not sure I would consider 6% likelihood of a raise in september a significant possibility.

Where did my "possible go" become your "significant possibility"? The circumstances are favorable that a rate increase will happen in September. But a lot of things can happen between now and then that might dash a rate increase. If not September, then December becomes a possible go. So forth and so on.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[imgod2u]

What is "artificial" in your mind and what isn't? You act like there's some golden measurement of inflation and GDP that was correct, but now isn't. I'd argue the opposite is true. The current measurement of inflation and GDP may be way off since they fail to capture the parts of the economy that has been invented but not accounted for by the Fed. For instance, the iTunes music/movie store or Uber drivers' wages and Uber ride costs.

In reality, inflation may be far lower than what's being calculated and GDP may be far higher. What used to be everything people consumed (food, clothing, cars, houses) that is used to measure inflation isn't the whole of people's daily or annual consumption anymore. And those things have gotten cheaper, not more expensive, over time.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[LynnwoodRooster]

Artificial is to change the measure so that your GDP appears to grow faster than it really does. Inflation scales down the GDP growth rate, and calculating inflation is - as you rightfully point out - a fairly fuzzy function. However, if you want to talk about ending a recession, or the "best GDP growth in decades" you should use the same measures and ways of calculating your variables - not change them from Administration to Administration.

If we used the 1980 inflation metric, we'd see inflation is not at the 1% level claimed now, but around 9%. That brings the GDP growth way down, especially over the last several years, and we'd find that rather than having a GDP growing by 2-3% per year as claimed, we'd actually have a slowly shrinking GDP. Meaning we'd still be in a recession (as defined pre-1990s). That would change the narrative in the media - and might be politically untenable for the current group of fools in DC.

I think a LOT of the tension in the US right now is because of the constant media narrative of "we're doing great! See how wonderful DC is to the rest of you?" versus the actual results felt by the average person. Stagnant wages, ever-increasing costs, lack of jobs. It's a LOT easier, emotionally, when you're struggling but you also know everyone else is as well, and you're all trying to work for something better. When all you're told is that everything is fine, there is not problem, and YOU lose your job or your house or start missing payments on bills - it feels like it's just YOU and it's you against everyone else.

An honest, consistent metric for inflation would show that.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[__aaclcg7560]

It's a LOT easier, emotionally, when you're struggling but you also know everyone else is as well, and you're all trying to work for something better. When all you're told is that everything is fine, there is not problem, and YOU lose your job or your house or start missing payments on bills - it feels like it's just YOU and it's you against everyone else.

"A recession is when your neighbor is out of work. A depression is when you're out of work." - Ronald Reagan

Re:corporate fanboyism

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are the one who's not current on Fed policy.

The Fed wants the market to think that the Fed wants to raise rates ... the Fed (in aggregate) does NOT want to raise rates.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[__aaclcg7560]

The Fed wants the market to think that the Fed wants to raise rates ... the Fed (in aggregate) does NOT want to raise rates.

Yet the Fed raised interest rates in December 2015.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[imgod2u]

Artificial is to change the measure so that your GDP appears to grow faster than it really does.

How do you determine what "real" GDP growth is? Again, you seem to imply that how it was done in the 1970's and 1980's were the "correct way".

However, if you want to talk about ending a recession, or the "best GDP growth in decades" you should use the same measures and ways of calculating your variables - not change them from Administration to Administration.

I agree that the rhetoric of "best GDP growth in decades" is inaccurate at best. But that doesn't mean the measurement of GDP should not be updated with the changing economy. If we simply stuck with how GDP was measured X number of decades ago, we'd end up calculating nothing but how many bushels of corn was produced every year and how many heads of cattle were reared. The point of GDP is to measure *all* of the productive power of the U.S. And what "productive power" means changes whenever someone invents something new or when the population of the world all of a sudden demand something different. Changing how you measure GDP to accurately reflect all of the production and all of the demand, which changes all the time, that isn't rigging the measurement system; it's a way of keeping GDP relevant.

As an analogy, what you're proposing is analogous to the Dow Industrial average. The measurement method has been kept the same for a century. But the method used is incredibly crude and doesn't at all capture the nuances of the stock market, let alone the capital economy. Just because I replace the Dow with something more accurate that actually shows market growth doesn't mean I've "fudged the numbers". If I introduce the S&P, for instance and see year-after-year growth of the S&P while the Dow stays stagnant, that doesn't mean my newfound measurement is not correct.

I think a LOT of the tension in the US right now is because of the constant media narrative of "we're doing great! See how wonderful DC is to the rest of you?"

Is that *really* what you see the media doing? All I see, especially on the more conservative end, are doom-and-gloom stories similar to your narrative. It cherry-picks things that sound bad and then paints some sort of apocalyptic portrait of what the state of the U.S. is.

In reality, how many people are actually unemployed who want to work? How many people are starving or homeless? How many can't afford the basics of life? Does the average person's quality of life today suffer compared to, say, someone in the 1990's or 1980's? Actual, objective quality-of-life.

All I hear is that people "feel" like they aren't as well off compared to some rose-colored memory of decades past. That "feeling", of course, is greatly affected by what kind of narrative their favorite media source paints.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[Anonymous Coward]

The Fed wants the market to think that the Fed wants to raise rates ... the Fed (in aggregate) does NOT want to raise rates.

Yet the Fed raised interest rates in December 2015.

If you have never had to do something you didn't want to do then you have lived a very charmed life.

The fed raised finally rates the littlest they could because they'd spent so long saying "this time I'm really going to do it" that they were almost out of credibility.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[__aaclcg7560]

The fed raised finally rates the littlest they could because they'd spent so long saying "this time I'm really going to do it" that they were almost out of credibility.

The Fed are trying to avoid repeating the mistakes that the European Union Central Bank did: raise rates, watch the economy crater, reverse rates, and damage the economy further. If the Fed raises interest rates, they have no intention of reversing the rate increase soon. Their credibility in the short term will take a hit as they take their time to determine when to raise rates.

Re:corporate fanboyism

[LynnwoodRooster]

How do you determine what "real" GDP growth is? Again, you seem to imply that how it was done in the 1970's and 1980's were the "correct way".

If you're going to draw comparisons between different decades, you need a standard measurement. Keep the way inflation was calculated, and you'd find the GDP would be about 10% lower - because that's the impact of inflation on it. And by that measure - we're still in the recession that started in 2007.

All I hear is that people "feel" like they aren't as well off compared to some rose-colored memory of decades past. That "feeling", of course, is greatly affected by what kind of narrative their favorite media source paints.

Lowest labor force participation rate in 2 generations. Record levels of food stamps use. Record numbers on welfare. Stagnant wages. A Federal Government adding $4 billion in debt every day. It's not all roses now, not at all...

Re:corporate fanboyism

[imgod2u]

If you're going to draw comparisons between different decades, you need a standard measurement. Keep the way inflation was calculated, and you'd find the GDP would be about 10% lower - because that's the impact of inflation on it. And by that measure - we're still in the recession that started in 2007.

Even if, as I point out, the economy changes and new productivity categories are added that GDP doesn't take into account? What you're proposing is the equivalent of only measuring what was the whole economy in the 1980's but is only part of the economy in 2010 and then saying "look, that hasn't grown!". Well, no, it hasn't. Because we've added more stuff that isn't categorized by the old measurement into the economy and the old stuff became commodities after everyone has one.

Let's do analogy time. In 2003, I come up with a way to measure the revenue of a company. Let's call that company Apple Computers. Let's pretend we don't have full shareholder reporting and are kinda blind (like we are with the US economy). But I know that 99% of the revenue collected by Apple Computers is based on number of Macintosh computers sold. So I define my "iGDP" as "lets measure number of Macs sold every year" as an indirect way of defining "productivity" of Apple Computers.

In 2013, if I used the same method of measuring "iGDP", I'd say "hey! Apple Computers (now Apple Inc) has only grown by ~50%" since number of Macs sold every year has only gone up 50%. That's essentially what you're proposing. "Keeping the measurement method the same".

The flaw with the above approach, of course, is that since 2003, Apple Computers has become Apple Inc and has added whole new product lines that my original "iGDP" measurement didn't take into account. In 2003, measuring "iGDP" by counting number of Macs sold was accurate enough. In 2013, it's wildly off. Because in reality, Apple Inc hasn't grown 50%, it's grown roughly 2000%. If I made the statement "Apple Inc has had the best year ever, growth has been 2000%" it'd be way more accurate than "Apple Computer has had the best year ever, growth has been 50%". Yet you're proposing the later, not the former.

"GDP" is just a best-effort approximation. What it represents is the whole productive power of the U.S. economy. That "best-effort" changes as the economy changes. But stating that the economy has grown and grown faster than past decades is not inaccurate.

Lowest labor force participation rate in 2 generations [bls.gov]. Record levels of food stamps use [trivisonno.com]. Record numbers on welfare [cnsnews.com]. Stagnant wages [pewresearch.org]. A Federal Government adding $4 billion in debt every day [treasurydirect.gov]. It's not all roses now, not at all...

Unemployment rate 1980-2016 is lower, Federal revenue is much higher.

I can hand-pick stats that favors my narrative as well. Especially since 2 of your stats naturally goes up as the population increases.

About the only thing I think you and I can agree on is that stagnant wages are a problem. Also, to note, labor force participation rate from 1980-2016 changed from ~64% to ~63%. Hardly the insane apocalypse you seem to imply.

Maybe they're starting to get that people hate 'em

[Anonymous Coward]

Workers in the finance industry reported a similar loss in confidence following the 2008 crash.

Telecommuting FTW

[DoofusOfDeath]

I've been telecommuting for the past two years, for a virtual company, and I hope I never need to give it up.

There are some things I miss, in particular (a) my wife not needing to keep our kids somewhat quiet during school vacations, and (b) having a ready-made social life due to being cooped up with coworkers.

But after working out some of the kinks, and with a just a little extra self-discipline, it's so, so worth it.

Even if an employer needs to pay and $5k/year to cover telecommute-specific costs (such as decent video conference equipment, etc.), it seems it must be a win-win for just about everyone involved. (At least for software development jobs. Not sure about other kinds.)

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

$5k/year to cover telecommute-specific costs

What types of thing does your employer maintain? I ask because I'm in a similar situation as yours, and have been for 7 years now. For me it was the up-front cost of computer hardware (which would be required on-site anyways) and then, in the total time I've been doing it, the company has only ever had to pay to replace a hard drive and a laptop battery. It seems they've spent far less than that yearly maintenance cost you quoted in the entire time I've been here -- and certainly save a lot of money by not requiring the renting of office space.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

(b) having a ready-made social life due to being cooped up with coworkers.

Now this is odd, as I've never had much interest in spending more time with co-workers once the day's work is done.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he meant at work - shared lunches, breaks etc.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be time to look for a different job then. It's certainly possible to be friends with your coworkers -- and makes the work day that much more enjoyable.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[fozzy1015]

I've been telecommuting for the past two years, for a virtual company, and I hope I never need to give it up.

There are some things I miss, in particular (a) my wife not needing to keep our kids somewhat quiet during school vacations, and (b) having a ready-made social life due to being cooped up with coworkers.

But after working out some of the kinks, and with a just a little extra self-discipline, it's so, so worth it.

Even if an employer needs to pay and $5k/year to cover telecommute-specific costs (such as decent video conference equipment, etc.), it seems it must be a win-win for just about everyone involved. (At least for software development jobs. Not sure about other kinds.)

$5k/year for telecommute costs? Maintaining a VPN and having decent conferencing equipment shouldn't cost that much. And if it does, the savings in office space(have you seen what SV office space costs?) more than makes up for it.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

And networking. It's not uncommon to find a new job because someone you used to work with that you talked with often moved on and kept you in mind when a suitable opening appeared at their next employer.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Robert Goatse]

Telecommuter here as well and it is so, so worth it. With mostly everyone and their grandmother having a decent Internet connection, it doesn't make sense to have to sit in hours of traffic just to get to work. Granted, some places need a warm body on site, but if you can telecommute even for a few days, I highly recommend it. If you want to sit at home and fuck off all day, telecommuting is not for you. If you have a shred of self-discipline (as mentioned above), you can definitely be successful at it.

During the last few years I've regained my sanity and have become a more productive worker due to not having to put up with the distractions of sitting in a 'normal' workspace. Not to mention the hours saved sitting in traffic and the flexibility to pick up the kids, run errands, etc..

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[DoofusOfDeath]

What types of thing does your employer maintain?

I was just trying to be conservative, which is why I pull the $5k out of thin air.

When I started up, I was given a ~$3500 budget for computer stuff and office furniture. Then we bought me a laptop for when I was on travel, which cost about $1200 IIRC.

Aside from that, there's the cost of having us travel to some random hotel for company meetings about 3 times/year. That probably averages about $800 per person per trip.

If/when we're more flush with cash, we may invest in something akin to large shared whiteboards. It would probably be a win in terms of productivity, but we'll save that experiment for a time when we can more easily afford for it to not pan out.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[DoofusOfDeath]

$5k/year for telecommute costs? Maintaining a VPN and having decent conferencing equipment shouldn't cost that much.

You're right, it doesn't. I was just trying to be conservative, because my main point was not that it was a cost-savings from the employer's perspective. (Although it almost certainly is, considering the saved money on office-space.)

Also, there's no need to price the cost of commuting into my salary, which is just a net win all around.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[bzipitidoo]

I love telecommuting, saves a lot of time and hassle fighting rush hour traffic and maintain a car. Not to mention that it can be far away so one doesn't have to move, a very expensive and life disruptive process. I'm willing to accept quite a bit less pay for a telecommuting position. But it is against most employers' religion, even progressive seeming technology employers such as Google.

Many cling hard to the mindset that workers are lazy slackers who have to be closely monitored to ensure they're working instead of goofing off. Instead of leading and inspiring workers, they use the slave driver approach and push and prod workers. Much harder to push telecommuters, so they simply don't allow it. No doubt many workers would abuse the situation. But it wouldn't last. If the telecommuter doesn't do any work, this is going to be noticed pretty fast. Telecommuters can't get away with much more slacking than office workers, often even less because of the necessity to counter the higher levels of suspicion by working harder.

Then there are the managers who believe a work environment and the close communication it enables is necessary to be highly productive. And, yes there are environments, home environments especially, where doing any work is very difficult thanks to loud, needy family members. But it's hardly an insurmountable problem.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Grishnakh]

Sorry, it's been extremely rare that I was friends with my coworkers. The last people I want to be friends with are people who are either ultra-conservative or misogynists or both.

Honestly, if I could go back in time and tell my teenage self to pick another major, I'd tell him to go into medicine instead, so I could enjoy a career where I work with plenty of women rather than a sausagefest full of radical libertarians, and I could probably end up marrying a hot doctor. I love technology and electronics, but I really can't stand the other guys who go into this profession. Even the commenters on this forum disgust me most of the time.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea... It seems you're that guy at work that everyone hates. Thanks for staying home.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

The last people I want to be friends with are people who are either ultra-conservative or misogynists or both.

It's amazing how some people explicitly avoid diversity in their personal life. What is even more amazing is when some of these same people rant about the "lack of diversity" in the workplace or school or neighborhood.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Fire_Wraith]

I've seen that approach far too many places. Usually it was just one symptom of an overall bad manager, or a bad management culture. To be sure, I've seen cases of people who ruined it for others, but on the whole, the true metric should be whether or not work gets done, and done to standard/on time, because that's not going to change regardless of whether someone is in the office or remote.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, it's been extremely rare that I was friends with my coworkers. The last people I want to be friends with are people who are either ultra-conservative or misogynists or both.

Honestly, if I could go back in time and tell my teenage self to pick another major, I'd tell him to go into medicine instead, so I could enjoy a career where I work with plenty of women rather than a sausagefest full of radical libertarians, and I could probably end up marrying a hot doctor. I love technology and electronics, but I really can't stand the other guys who go into this profession. Even the commenters on this forum disgust me most of the time.

Like being surrounded by a bunch of feminists in a hen house is any better. I've seen such environments back when I used to do IT support, the drama and backstabbing was even worse than at a typical male-dominated office.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Grishnakh]

Why would I want to be friends with religious nuts or misogynists? And how does that equate to "avoiding diversity"? Am I "avoiding diversity" if I refuse to associate with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, black power groups, or ISIS members?

What a stupid comment.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[Tablizer]

The problem is that if your job is easy to telecommute-ify, then it's also easy to offshore to somebody willing accept far less pay. If the org is more comfortable having a person physically there, they are less likely to consider offshoring.

Re:Telecommuting FTW

[antdude]

Ditto for my current 1 year and 26 days old remote 100% contract job even though I am missing fringe benefits and missing seeing people and fun in person events. No more commutings, strict hours, don't need to dress up, etc. It rocks!

How does this compare historically?

[H3lldr0p]

Are the percentages the same or different from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago? If they are different, is it a significant difference?

Articles like these are frustrating since without the above sort of analysis, it's hard to think of them as anything other than propaganda pieces.

Of course...

[EmeraldBot]

Well yeah, of course. Look at the situation of a young college grad today; they're entering the workforce loaded on with $80,000+ dollars of debt, in an extremely cutthroat environment that pays minimum wage on entry, and for companies that lower pay and outsource year after year. Silicon Valley is frankly just not really viable for starters anymore, it's too expensive and cutthroat, and I wouldn't move to San Francisco in that kind of a climate either. Furthermore, Silicon Valley is dominated by experienced people who've worked numerous high profile projects, and often have a whole rainbow array of certifications and degrees.

If you're just starting out, you're hammered between the minimum wage jobs in China and India that take away your entry level positions, and you can't compete with the existing crowd because they outclass you in experience, titles, and existing reputation in almost every way (even after accounting for the whole age thing). Honestly, young people in many jobs face a similar problem - it's not exclusively a tech industry problem, we just see it to the strongest degree at the moment - It's a serious issue, and if we don't start to do something about it and soon, we are going to slowly but surely strangle off our workforce.

More to it than that...

[CaptnCrud]

The cost of living and residence cost is a big one, but also its the attitudes and egos, then you have the sheer smugness some of the people exhibit from san fran all the way down to san diego.

I kills me because as an austinite i've seen much of all those negatives slowly start to creep in from all the california transplants...the self entitlement & smuggery is very strong in that town now...along with $$ costs. I don't even bother with SWSW anymore...I remember when the tickets were $10...back in 87, now? You looking at $1,500 for a full weekend pass.

Re:More to it than that...

[drinkypoo]

I kills me because as an austinite i've seen much of all those negatives slowly start to creep in from all the california transplants...the self entitlement & smuggery is very strong in that town now.

I've got to break it to you, but all of Texas is self-entitled and smug, just about different things. I've been across it and up and down. And as a Californian living in Austin, I did my best not to change anything because I liked Austin just fine the way it was, except for the weather. Now I don't live there anymore.

I don't even bother with SWSW anymore...I remember when the tickets were $10...back in 87, now? You looking at $1,500 for a full weekend pass.

SXSW would cost that much sooner or later even if you didn't let people come from outside of Texas. Ignore it and enjoy the nightly live music scene.

Re:More to it than that...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got to break it to you, but all of Texas is self-entitled and smug, just about different things.

Thank you so much for that pithy nugget. What else do you have for us.

Ignore it and enjoy the nightly live music scene.

Yes sir.

Now I don't live there anymore.

Good. And I hope the door that hit you on the way out left a rusty nail in your ass.

Re:More to it than that...

[drinkypoo]

Good. And I hope the door that hit you on the way out left a rusty nail in your ass.

Of course you do, because Texas. Guess what? We have shitloads of you here, too, and none of you can fucking drive. You're slow and you don't know how to signal. Stay home.

Re:More to it than that...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a native Austinite and remember when people were actually friendly, and the only time a horn was used at an intersection was someone waving to another. Now, with all the California refugees, the city is as rude as any place in LA. To boot, rents are just insane. My last job, people were leaving back to the Bay Area from Austin due to rents being too high and no amenities.

Yes, California transplants will find Texans not as friendly in the past, because they come here, hating the local culture, hating the honkey-tonks, and demanding the locals change their ways, with the only reason they come here are the paychecks. The music scene is completely dead in Austin, with the musicians being relegated to the smaller towns around the area. SXSW is too expensive for most people, being $1500 for a pass, and $80 a day for parking. Local bands don't even have a chance.

Commutes? Thanks due to the clueless people voting, there has not been a major road improvement since 1995, except the addition of toll roads. San Antonio has created a second loop, and is making a third. Houston has completed a second loop. Austin has yet to even expand a major highway by a single lane since the 1980s. Ride a bike? If lucky to be near the hike/bike trails, sure. Otherwise, there is a good chance you will be commuting on narrow roads... and any car/bike collision invariably turns into a hit and run. (I have personally put up a number of ghost bikes to show that fact.

Amenities? If I want to do something fun, I go to one of the smaller towns where parking/shopping is possible.

Re:More to it than that...

[Grishnakh]

then you have the sheer smugness some of the people exhibit from san fran all the way down to san diego.

I guess that explains why Hillary won the California primaries.

This was on HackerNews two days ago

[mha]

It's nice to see that recycling between the various forum sites works well. I don't really mind, I don't even ever complain about reposts unless they are too frequent, but here's the link to the long discussion of the exact same article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

I don't blame them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the situation of a young college grad today; they're entering the workforce loaded on with $80,000+ dollars of debt, ...

You must go to "top" schools to get a job these days. Anecdotal:

At a July 4th party, and someone was complaining about how there is a shortage of CS grads and the bidding war over them. After having been at a recent graduation at a state uni and seeing half the class stand up when the college of computer science was called, I was a bit incredulous. So I asked.

The response was "we only recruit from top colleges."

"MIT, Stanford, ... ?"

"Georgia Tech."

So some really sharp hard working kid who commutes to say Kennesaw State to save money and get the most out of his HOPE Scholarship and not end up in debt for most of his life, will be passed over. I think SHE/HE's the goddamn genius!

Employers are fucking stupid.

I have another ancedote about my 60 year old neighbor who was fired because he didn't go to Stanford and he was "too old to be a programmer" - (lawyer said he couldn't prove it so no case.)

There's a lot of snobbery in this profession now. Even when I started in the 90s, if you didn't have a college degree you were discounted and not hired at many places.

Re:I don't blame them.

[__aaclcg7560]

There's a lot of snobbery in this profession now.

A recruiter submitted my resume and a half-dozen other resumes to a law firm in Palo Alto for a contract tech position. The hiring manager rejected all the resumes out of hand for "lacking tenure" (i.e., 3+ years in each of the last three positions). The recruiter was incredulous. Following the Great Recession, contractors had to work multiple assignments and/or positions to stay afloat. If anyone had 3+ years in each of the last three positions, they wouldn't be applying for a contract position.

AFAIK, the position was still open a year later.

Re:I don't blame them.

[ErichTheRed]

"There's a lot of snobbery in this profession now."

Agreed -- almost no one without a degree is even considered, and you might as well not even try getting hired at a Silicon Valley startup as a new grad unless you went to Stanford, MIT, etc. even if the work you're doing doesn't have anything to do with CS.

I do think that businesses are using the pedigree as more of a filter than anything else. Investment banks and white shoe management consulting firms hire almost exclusively from the Ivy League. A new lawyer has no chance of success unless they get hired by a big corporate law firm, and those jobs _only_ go to the top grads of the top 14 law schools in the country. As in, you've wasted your law school money if you can't get into the Top 14 and graduate at the top of your class. These more traditional professions use their filter to keep the old boys' (and girls') club going. Getting into one of these companies is a guaranteed ticket to riches for life. Tech companies? Probably not...I think they're just trying to beat off a massive pile resumes with a really short-sighted stick. The state university grad is smarter for not blowing their money on an overpriced private school degree, but state universities also graduate a range of students. Some skated through with barely any work, and some worked their asses off to make sure they mastered the material. It's stupid that firms pass on people just because of where they went to school, but when you have thousands of new grads looking for work, what else are they going to do? Interview them all?

Re:I don't blame them.

[Anonymous Coward]

The response was "we only recruit from top colleges."

"MIT, Stanford, ... ?"

"Georgia Tech."

Even then there's no guarantee of a good job. I've got high school buddies that went to Tech and graduated with engineering degrees working for startups making almost nothing. Makes me happy I went out of state to play football, got a humanities degree, then came back and got an IR master's from Ga State. I'm now working for one of the biggest employers in GA, making over 50k a year (which goes a long way in the north metro area) and am one of the youngest people in my department. And best of all I work from 8-4 and even get to work from home a day or 2 a week.

Re:I don't blame them.

[Joe_Dragon]

I have another ancedote about my 60 year old neighbor who was fired because he didn't go to Stanford and he was "too old to be a programmer" - (lawyer said he couldn't prove it so no case.)

There's a lot of snobbery in this profession now. Even when I started in the 90s, if you didn't have a college degree you were discounted and not hired at many places.

Just an put X for why we passed over the US guy so we can get the H1B.

Re:I don't blame them.

[Joe_Dragon]

Maybe they want some who say worked for same base firm aka robert half / SmartSource / etc for years.

Re:I don't blame them.

[imgod2u]

I've worked for 3 household-named tech companies now. The interns we get every year have been from good, well known tech schools but definitely not exclusively Ivy League. Off the top of my head:

Good mix of UC's, not just Berkeley or LA. SD is pretty engineering heavy but so is SB, Davis, Santa Cruz.
Michigan State, NC State, USF, UT Austin, Oregon State, UW.

There are just as many from any of those schools as from MIT, Stanford or Georgia Tech. And places like Harvard/Columbia get passed up more often than not.

This isn't snobbery, this is pure probability. All of those schools I listed have very good engineering programs with a history of graduating good engineers. Nationally, they may not be "top schools", but that doesn't matter.

Internship is by far the most valuable way of getting both the skills and recognition needed to either get a good job or start a decent startup.

Re:I don't blame them.

[__aaclcg7560]

Maybe they want some who say worked for same base firm aka robert half / SmartSource / etc for years.

Those are the kind of people who weren't looking for a new job at the time.

Re:I don't blame them.

[HornWumpus]

FYI there are _no_ good tech schools in the ivy league.

MIT isn't ivy.

Re:I don't blame them.

[DerpQuake]

RE: "You must go to "top" schools to get a job these days." - That would be the best reason to go with Silicon Valley. Some companies care about that here, most care about what you know. The East coast is thirty years behind on cultural change. I'm sure there are other areas that can make the same claim (maybe Pacific Northwest / Denver), but the East coast continues to surprise me.

Re:I don't blame them.

[Killer Instinct]

I dont have a college degree. I have been working full time since the mid '90's. I have no problem getting a tech job (Linux Admin currently, Software Engineer for 10+ years, system engineer for 5 +) and for the record i am 45. Not sure if that means im young enough to hire and have enough experience...or if there really are a lot of US companies hiring US citizens. I have choose to never work on the (North) East coast (i worked in Sunrise FL for awhile) or the west coast. The midwest, southwest dont seem to have a lot of H1B and they still chooose to hire US to manage India when they do farm out some work for them. (apps, windoz stuff I wont touch...so it doesnt bother me)

It's the tech industry as a whole

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 2016, being IN Silicon Valley is irrelevant.

The IT industry as a whole is losing its luster due to (perceived) low barrier to entry, the commoditization of the workforce, and price pressure from overseas. When your PHB can hire a javascript node.js mongodb programmer with 10 certs and 10 years of experience for 20K, you're gone. The shitty product they deliver (or dont) isn't relevant to the PHB, who slides along to his next shop, slashing and burning as he goes.

Like Uber, the IT industry in general converts (your) capital dollars into their operating dollars, until you have no more stored capital, at which point they move along to the next sucker.

It's Dotcom Bubble 2.0, everyone's ignoring it

[ErichTheRed]

The famous quote "those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it" is very applicable here. This exact scenario played out in the late 90s during the build-out of the Internet and the web. The things that are different this time are phones and social media are the primary focus, and the bubble is almost entirely in Silicon Valley this time. (Last time, New York City had a part in this because of the financial ties and the fact that traditional publishers and broadcasters were throwing money at the Internet.)

I think that people are starting to see the top of the bubble and opting not to join startups. Startup culture isn't for the young either; you really have to have the fraternity/sorority member personality type to work there so as people age they're less likely to trade salary for beer pong or free dinner. This will be the third recession that I've been on the sidelines doing "boring" work in old-school companies watching the startup mania from a distance. No one with a family or other responsibilities is going to do startup work as their first choice unless they have massive amounts of savings. Very few people (should be) willing to put up with the terrible commutes, traffic and real estate prices in the Bay Area. (That's coming from a New Yorker, we have the second-most insane housing market and I think it's crazy...$1 million+ for a tiny house a 2-hour one way drive to work? $4500 a month for a 2-bedroom hipster loft in San Francisco? Nope, sorry.)

I think, just like last time, it'll all come crashing down, we'll pick up the cool new stuff that came out of the last bubble (not much this time...), and it'll inflate all over again. I just hope something more useful than advertising algorithms comes out of the next bubble.

Re:It's Dotcom Bubble 2.0, everyone's ignoring it

[jebrick]

. Startup culture isn't for the young either; you really have to have the fraternity/sorority member personality type to work there so as people age they're less likely to trade salary for beer pong or free dinner.

I disagree that it is not for the young. They want people who can work 70-100 hours a week. Those people do not have families. If they do their wife does not work. Or if they both work then they have no kids. Startups should have no problem with a 30% turnover rate or higher.

Re:It's Dotcom Bubble 2.0, everyone's ignoring it

[luis_a_espinal]

. Startup culture isn't for the young either; you really have to have the fraternity/sorority member personality type to work there so as people age they're less likely to trade salary for beer pong or free dinner.

I disagree that it is not for the young. They want people who can work 70-100 hours a week. Those people do not have families. If they do their wife does not work. Or if they both work then they have no kids. Startups should have no problem with a 30% turnover rate or higher.

They want people who appear busy for 70-100 hours a week. 70-100 hours a week implies between 10 to 16 hours a day (depending of whether you work 6 days or work without taking a day off.) Then add 1-2 hours of commute, we are talking 10 to 18 hours a day.

No matter how young you are, it is physically impossible to do *actual* work at that rate for more than a few weeks (or months at most.) From experience (and purely anecdotal), the physical and psychological upper limit seems to be 60 hours a week (less if you count commute times). And that translate to 10 to 12 hours every day (whether you work 5 or 6 days) sustained to no more than 8-12 months.

After that, attrition inevitably follows. I've seen companies having attrition rates of 50-60% (and worse) when they force their workforce through that type of grind for more than a year or two.

Unless you are building the next rocket to Mars or some other incredibly cool shit, you are an idiot if you subject yourself to that. You do not need that to gain valuable experience.

Re:It's Dotcom Bubble 2.0, everyone's ignoring it

[HornWumpus]

It's always a symptom of a manager that has no better metric than face time.

At the end of the two years, the net negative workers that still maintain face time will get good reviews and raises. The worker that is productive and keeps sane hours will be canned.

The solution is simply to flee, or never take the job in the first place.

Re:It's Dotcom Bubble 2.0, everyone's ignoring it

[BoberFett]

I'm glad those kids go for "glamorous" startups and big name Silicon Valley stalwarts. That leaves the good tech jobs for me, working in technology but not in the tech industry. I develop boring old line of business applications (technically not a developer anymore, moved into management, but the same applies), collect a good paycheck, and go home at a decent time.

Those kids can have the "cool" jobs. I don't want them.

Re:It's Dotcom Bubble 2.0, everyone's ignoring it

[BoberFett]

Oh, and in this part of the country, I can live better on my salary than someone making half again as much or more in Silicon Valley because home prices aren't absurd.

Re:It's Dotcom Bubble 2.0, everyone's ignoring it

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what you mean, same here. On the other hand I checked out the startup jobs - and even if I wanted them I couldn't fathom doing them. You want to pay me how little? I don't even get out of bed for that. Your stock is worthless, what do I do with stock options?

Sometimes I think I miss out on the next big thing however. Still, no way.

It lost its luster years ago

[JohnFen]

Being in Silicon Valley makes sense if your goal is to obtain VC money. If your goal is to make a successful tech business, though, Silicon Valley hasn't been the place to be for a very long time.

Re:It lost its luster years ago

[david_bonn]

Being in Silicon Valley makes sense if your goal is to obtain VC money. If your goal is to make a successful tech business, though, Silicon Valley hasn't been the place to be for a very long time.

... except that a lot of the infrastructure a startup needs (office furniture, law firms, accounting firms, pr companies, &c) is in the valley and is used to dealing with startups. In a lot of cases your VC can steer you to a pr firm or a leasing firm that will rent you office space -- and you often can pay at least partially with warrants. You can't get that same level of support elsewhere. Yet.

The other point is that most of the top-tier VC firms are in the valley. If you are just down the road from Kleiner Perkins they are a lot more likely to drop by and check you out as opposed to being in Kansas City or Omaha. Keep in mind that the top tier VC firms get literally thousands of business plans per month. They cannot possibly make money and fly all over the country to check out promising startups. But if you are in the Bay Area it is a lot more likely you will get a call back. Same thing goes with acquisitions.

Re:It lost its luster years ago

[JohnFen]

Was this a rebuttal? Because aside from your point about infrastructure (which is easy to find guidance about in most areas without involving VCs), it sounds like you're supporting my assertion.

It's about time!

[norweeg]

I, for one, am sick of this hyped up bubble-building, self-important, self-serving, John Galt-ian bullshit that Silicon Valley seems to be built/thrive on

Fine we only want people with level 25 or higher

[Joe_Dragon]

Fine we only want people with level 25 or higher luster and we can't find any us workers with that so we need more H1B's!

get rid of unlimited student loans / no bankruptcy

[Joe_Dragon]

get rid of unlimited student loans / no bankruptcy.

If the schools / banks had to bear some of the risk we will see real change in the school system and no more schools saying law / etc is the ticket to big bucks. It's about time for the schools / banks to hit the whammy!

Just like the last generation.

[jellomizer]

Back in the late 1990's during the .COM boom a lot of workers rushed out of school, (sometimes skilling degrees) to get jobs in the tech sector. To only have it crash in a few years. As economy 2.0 failed. These "kids" rushed to high paying jobs and invested in Silicon Valley with homes and infrastructure which raised the cost of living. After the crash while some moved out, however the housing bubble came in, then that popped a new tech economy came back. Making Silicon Valley just too expensive. Now I don't know if this is a new bubble or not, history will tell us this, however there are more focus on being profitable than the last time. However as these kids get out of school, and then grow up, realizing there is more to life than just work, The High Pressure Startups (asking 12+ hours a day) combined with high cost of living offsetting the additional money they make, makes them realize that they may be better off in a less exciting market, where they may be working tech in the more traditional roles.
We as tech guys sometimes are a bit full of ourselves, because we are often asked to do things that others just don't know how to do. Although they are a lot of us, and others can learn if they want to. Tech is currently one of the few Middle Class jobs out there, while you can get rich, it is rather rare. But if you are living a middle class life, then you need your Work Life balance.

Treasure vs. Cruising

[Tablizer]

When you are young and don't yet have a family, you typically want to seek "fame and fortune" and be where the action is. Even if you don't strike it rich, it's where you get experience with the latest trends (or sometimes fads).

When you have a family, or just want stability and convenience, you are happier with something relatively mundane. You worked your ass off for a while, and want to settle into more of a cruise mode as you mature. Working long hours will burn you out eventually. You will have at least one of weight problems, marriage/relationship problems, and/or physical problems like back and hand issues, or just shear boredom from doing the same thing for so long.

The high churn-and-burn rate, and cost of living of the Bay Area and start-ups can wear one down.

Re:get rid of unlimited student loans / no bankrup

[Anonymous Coward]

So you want to destroy the dream of college for so many people because the interest rates will have to be very high to offset the number of kids that will simply just steal money from the banks. No, not allowing these kids to rob banks makes the interest rates a fraction of what they would be if they were allowed to rob the banks.

Re:get rid of unlimited student loans / no bankrup

[Joe_Dragon]

The schools will lower costs / cut joke degrees. And this will save the nightmare of student loan repayments that even with people who disabled and can't work it is hard to get rid of.

Re:Silicon Valley sucks for other reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why you'd say that, I've never minded having a gay shoved down MY throat.

At least, as long as he's smooth, young, and deliciously cute.

*wink*

Joke degrees & football.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back to Kennesaw State. Last year or so and against many many alum's wishes, they created a football program. Now, KSU has an incredible reputation for its nursing program and healthcare pre-professional program (pre-med, pre-vet, pre-dentistry). But the regents wanted a football team because - drum roll - football teams bring in MONEY! And with states cutting school budgets, well it looked like a great way to boost the coffers.

And what degrees are those football players (the players who were recruited for their athletic abilities alone*) gonna get?

So, we need reforms in our higher education system along with reforms in the student loan program. And the NCAA needs to be overhauled.

* I once had a chemistry teacher years ago who played football as an undergrad. He wasn't all American or anything, he just liked playing football - and got a lot of shit from his advisor. ("Chemists DON'T play football!") My point is that I'm going on generalities here.

Re:Joke degrees & football.

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO, there are no "joke" degrees. I guess I am from the Old School -- the school where the point was education pursuits rather than job training.

Re:Joke degrees & football.

[toddestan]

The "joke" degrees come from the school of business. History, Philosophy, Art, Literature, etc. are all fine degrees for a university.

Concentrated Access to Tech in the Valley/SF

[Anonymous Coward]

It's access to tech,and the people in tech that makes the bay area (SV, SF) desirable.
So many meetups, hackathons, conferences that type of resource is not available in most other areas.
We could all name about 6-8 cites that might have this type of access.

 

Fine by me, they can all GTFO

[hamtux6]

Let the bubble burst--Silicon Valley, San Francisco, the housing market. Let it fucking burn to the goddamn ground. As one half of a couple of displaced Bay Areans, I'd love for things to even out a bit so we can afford to move back home. That's some fucking real bullshit, that no one ever talks about. People who have spent their entire lives there, people whose families have been there since before the bridges were built, are being straight-up priced out. Fuck that. Not like I'm poor, either--far from it. But despite what some dumb fucks in the newspapers would like to tell me it is NOT an acceptable compromise to barely scrape by in a shitty hovel of a one bedroom apartment in a meh part of town, for three times the rent of a goddamned single family home elsewhere.

Re:Fine by me, they can all GTFO

[Anonymous Coward]

If you and your family have lived there since before the bridges were built, you should have owned your own home. So it shouldn't have been a problem? No one can kick you out if you owned your home.

Re:Fine by me, they can all GTFO

[tnk1]

Yeah, but it is 100% possible that the other inconveniences of living in an area like that can also have an effect, even if you can live in a decent place due to long tenure.

Admittedly, I would think that having a stake in the area early would make it easier to stay, but I don't know if I'd want to live in SV or SF even if someone transplanted my single family home to a patch of sufficient land there. I've been both places, the only thing they've got going for them is the tech scene. SF is a nice city, but not so nice that it is worth the hassles that come with living there.

Never understood it

[QuasiEvil]

Personally, you almost couldn't pay me enough to live anywhere in the Bay Area. I mean sure, there's some number at which I could put up with it for a couple years and then retire elsewhere, but it's crowded, expensive, and I find generally unpleasant. I dread any time I have to go work in SFO, SJC, or OAK. About the only place I'd want to live in CA is out along the eastern edge - think Inyo County - or maybe anywhere north of Redding (east or west).

Then again, I generally loathe humanity other than a small group that I call friends. I like my space - open roads, clear skies, high speed limits, and enough property that I can keep my neighbors at least a quarter mile in any direction.

At the end of the day - and it has been this way since two decades ago when I was fresh out of college - the most important thing to me is living where I want. I'm flexible enough that I can find work that meets my salary needs. I've never understood the appeal of the Bay Area, and I probably never will.

But hey, if folks all want to be there, it keeps them from moving closer to me.

Re:Silicon Valley sucks for other reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

> *twink*

there, fixed that for you.

Cost Of Living + Snobbery + Ageism

[luis_a_espinal]

Tech Workers Think Silicon Valley and Startups Are Losing Their Luster

The cost of living in the valley is so ridiculous now that one has to make double (or more) than what you could make in Dallas or Denver just to afford a townhome in a decent zip code. This has always been a serious consideration for couples, and it has started to be for the new wave of college grads who are more financially conscious than their predecessors (yes, there is a measurable change in spending habits among younger people.)

Then there is the snobbery of the hiring process. By God, the snobbery by which some companies use when sending rejection letters and e-mails. I've never seen anything like this anywhere.

And last but not least, the ageism. It exists, it is an open secret. So what kind of outcome can a region expect to get when it methodically culls senior people that have accumulated experience on the trenches? Sooner or later that kind of shit is going to come back.

Put all of these three on top of the definition of innovation as "inventing the next mobile/social shit app". Innovation occurs predominantly where software meets hardware to provide unique solutions and opportunities. That is not the valley's bread and butter anymore. Too many unicorns.

So yeah, loss of luster is not surprising. At. All.

Re:Cost Of Living + Snobbery + Ageism

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, if their experience is working at firms which later ditch them for people who are even younger, I wonder what level of experience they actually have.

Your experience is working with hipster idiots. You've gained very good experience with smugness, overwork, and beard maintenance, but not very much on the whole "not making mistakes" scale.

Re:Silicon Valley sucks for other reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

mmmm, now you're speaking my language, sailor.

When you scale, you lost everything

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the valley model.

You startup in some cheap area, then when you scale, the valley heavyweights take over and guess what--you lose out or get bought out....

And the valley still controls the game.

Re:get rid of unlimited student loans / no bankrup

[TheRaven64]

The system in the UK is superficially similar, but entails a lot less risk. The government guarantees student loans (from a single company) of up to a fixed limit. Once you graduate, they collect interest at the rate of inflation. You begin to start paying them back when your salary passes a certain threshold and the repayments are taken off at the same time as taxes. If you don't pay them back by the time you hit retirement age, the loan is written off. If you never earn enough to hit the threshold, then you most likely didn't get any benefit from the degree and you get the education for free. If you do, then you're effectively paying a few percent more tax each year until it's paid back.

From a purely economic standpoint, the system works well: people who go to university and end up earning more pay for their degrees over a long period post graduation. The problem is psychological: working class people are more likely to be averse to debt than middle class people and so it has a slight effect of dissuading people from poorer backgrounds from applying.