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Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

I share you bullishness about "untapped" cities, but:

> ...starting a company in an area that does not need the top tier of engineers...

As far as quality of talent, the "top tier of engineers" aren't all in SF, Seattle, or NYC. There are plenty of "top tier" engineers in all kinds of places.

If you mean the "top tier" in pay rates are in those cities, that probably true. But those cities also have a ridiculous cost of living adjustment baked in.

I might be misreading what you're writing here, but it sounds like you're saying, "Try founding a place in Champaign, Ill. The engineers aren't top notch, but they're cheap enough to be worth it." I just wanted to push back against this meme.

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Also: Even though there are many top-tier engineers in those hotspots, just how gettable are they if you're hiring in SV/Seattle/NYC?

Based on my purely anecdotal experience, engineers that would be easy no-hires in Chicago get scooped up into senior roles in the valley because everyone there is so desperate to hire anyone who can fizzbuzz. It's the best area to be in if you're one of the best... and also if you're one of the worst. Top-flight talent exists in these "hotspots" but they're all "Unobtanium" for anything that isn't a unicorn, IPO'd, or founded by one of their friends.

> Based on my purely anecdotal experience, engineers that would be easy no-hires in Chicago get scooped up into senior roles

I left a Chicago Loop job 3 years ago for a fully remote startup, moved to Tampa, moved from that fully remote startup to a Tampa-based org, and Chicago recruiters get in touch 2-3 times a week offering full relo expenses. There literally is an insane amount of demand and people with very little experience being pulled into Chicago roles.

Greetings from across the bay in St Pete

Hello! :wave: If you're going to be at the St Pete Night Market tonight, happy to buy you a beverage (my email is in my HN profile)!

EDIT: I know I'm not allowed to complain about downvotes, but I'm doing it; why would someone downvote this comment? The poster I'm replying to is near me IRL, and I am just trying to be friendly and connect in person (and they have no contact info on their profile). No need to downvote or upvote.

> Top-flight talent exists but they're all "Unobtanium" for anything that isn't a unicorn, IPO'd, or founded by one of their friends

I disagree; top talent is very obtainable, provided that you have:

* decent compensation

* great culture

* interesting problems to solve

* a great hiring process

We've grown our engineering team from 12 to 29 since opening up shop in Kansas City this February, and I could not be happier with the quality of people that we've found.

I don't think the poster would consider Kansas City a "hotspot". I think he's referring to San Francisco/Silicon Valley, and New York.

Yep, you're right; I wouldn't call it a hotspot either. I must have been reading too fast.

It's easier to take a risk on a startup in a tech hub because you can likely find a job elsewhere if things don't work out. In a non-hub area, it's riskier to take the leap because fallback options are much more limited.

In my limited experience outside of one of those hubs I can say that's definitely a factor. I've spoken to a few good candidates that when decision time came got cold feet because of fear that the local ecosystem not being strong enough to provide a security cushion in case something went poorly.

This is what ultimately led to my moving to the Bay Area despite the pay increase not being even close to the cost of living increase. In Nowheresville, USA, a job change usually means moving to a different city. In the Bay Area and other tech hubs, you have a menu of options to choose from that don't involve picking up and moving your family.

That's interesting, never really thought of that way. I'll keep that in mind in my decision making process

It depends on what you are doing. If you are trying to build something like a database kernel, you want people who have done it before, very specialized. There aren't lots of them outside of the tech hotspots.

I don't necessarily mean there aren't smart people outside of the hotspots, but there isn't the specialized skillsets that get built from working at the Microsofts / Googles etc. edit: In the number that you need.

Champaign obviously has lots of smart people (my parents went there), but you may have issues finding specialized senior people there.

> There aren't lots of them outside of the tech hotspots.

Maybe. But how many people live in those places because that's where the well-paid jobs are?

Most of them I'd wager. Issue is, and it was for me, is that moving out of an area where I can walk down the street and get another great job to an area where the only great job is the one that this hypothetical company is offering just wasn't worth the risk. I have a wife and kids, and so do most specialized senior engineers.

> I have a wife and kids...

Sure, so minimal commute times and affordability of family homes in areas with good schools should be very appealing to many of the specialized senior engineers.

Moving the family is a pain, sure, but that just means the pitch needs to include why it's worth it for the family. And it means that senior engineers move cities less often. It doesn't mean they move less altogether.

Idle thought: this kind of risk (moving around too much) could be mitigated a bit by some sort of contractually guaranteed employment. A move to Princeton from SF would sound better if a four-year employment guarantee or a comparable cash buy-out was part of the employment agreement.

Honestly, if someone could mitigate the risk for this sort of thing, it's a huge deal.

Personally, I hate living in the tech hubs, I'd love to be able to move back to my hometown, it was a great place to raise kids, didn't have the same crushing traffic / monoculture and it was close to my family. I'm where I'm at due to the jobs, nothing else.

But what if it turns out the family hates it or the job is terrible and soul crushing? Now I'm kinda stuck there for 4 years.

What if the family hates SF or Seattle? That doesn't seem to enter the equation when recruiting people in the other direction.

The job-is-terrible concerns can be addressed other ways. Like putting the candidate up in temporary digs for a month or three while they decide on a longer-term deal. A reverse contract-to-hire, if you will. That sounds complicated, but it's not more complicated than a normal contract-to-hire.

I wouldn’t value a guarantee of employment by a startup, especially not one measured in years. The nature of a startup is that it’s risky, and risky things fail. Unless they put up some type of bond or buy an annuity with the employee as a beneficiary, I don’t see how that works. And they wouldn’t be able to afford it anyway.

Probably a good amount of them. But if you want to hire them, and you don't want to be there, you have to think pretty hard about how you're going to lure them away. Just saying, "The cost of living here is lower!" is a start, but it takes a lot more than that.

A good measure of where the best engineers are is where the best engineers migrate to. In the smaller communities I’ve been in over time I’ve seen the top engineers in the community migrate away. Engineers that come back from effectively unsuccessful 1-yearish stints at Big X companies often become top engineers in the communities to which they return. I think I’d want a lot of people evidence to agree with the claim that the top engineers that stay behind in communities that have substantial migration to the Valley are as good as the top engineers in the valley (Which hires engineering talent from all over the world). There may be a handful of people who are great and stay for various reasons. But there are very few teams in Champaign, Ill. Where every team member is in the top 5% of engineers globally. There are quite a few teams like this in the valley.

> A good measure of where the best engineers are is where the best engineers migrate to.

I would say that is only a good measure of where more money is being spent.

Unless you think money is being spent in a way that is anti-correlated with engineering quality the places providing the most savings are going to attract more of the best engineers. I think that is still the Bay Area as most analyses of savings I’ve seen exclude RSU’s which is a big factor here. The huge influx of talent seems to agree. To me it seems rather extraordinary to claim that an area with limited amounts of inward talent migration and fairly substantial outward talent migration is going to beat an area that consistently hires from all over the world. This is a statement about distributions and pools of talent: there are small numbers of extremely talented engineers everywhere. It’s a lot harder to find a critical mass of world class people.

> As far as quality of talent, the "top tier of engineers" aren't all in SF, Seattle, or NYC. There are plenty of "top tier" engineers in all kinds of places.

Surely depends on the metric used: the same people who, if brought up in one of the progressive teams at an SV giant or a well-funded startup might become celebrated code-fashionistas touring the conference speaker circuit, would likely have turned out very different had they joined the insurance company that was the only game in town. But the things they would have seen there! Not C-beams glittering in the darkness near the Tannhauser gate, bad a lot of bad code plastered over and over with half-hearted attempts to clean up during decades of maintenance and extension. If there are wisdoms to be learned from working with that one of our two hypotheticals will know them.

Except Champaign has top-tier engineers

I intended for that to be my point. They're not just in SF. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

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