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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

How does Bay Area fit in the narrative? From my personal point of view, Bay Area, where I live, offers very little to its residents: public schools have super low standards and low teaching qualities. Many of the schools use seemingly run-down portables while public schools in other states, such as WA, have amazing buildings and facilities. More than 1/3 of the families in the Bay Area choose private schools, the highest ratio in the US. The housing price has been through the roof. The average commute time is north of an hour. California also has higher taxes for income and business than most of the other states. Yet, people have been flocking to California (except last year) and tech companies still choose the Bay Area for their headquarters.

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Great weather.

A virtuous cycle of good people attracting businesses willing to pay a premium for good people attracting good people.

It all began when the US Navy starting using the bay area for research and technology, followed by Stanford getting into innovation and starting companies, then more tech companies started, hired people, attracted more people and more companies, and here we are.

... so why do you live there?

You choose it same as everyone else that's there now. Sounds like they compete well enough for you?

People often live here _despite_ the government, not because of it.

Great weather. 4 hours away from skiing. 1 hour away from the beach.

These things aren't attributable to the quality of the govt (except I will say that govt does do a decent job of preserving natural ecosystems)

>Great weather. 4 hours away from skiing. 1 hour away from the beach.

Why not move to Los Angeles, better weather, closer to skiing, and closer to the beach? Seems to me that there is still something the government is doing to keep you in the Bay Area.

I probably disagree on the weather but I don't really like heat. There are also a lot of local natural areas for hiking and so forth.

But, really, they're different. Take money out of the picture and tell me I needed to live in either SoCal or NoCal and I'd definitely pick the latter.

(And there's better skiing than both.)

Plus, LA is too dry, and the commute is even worse than in Bay Area.

So what you're saying is... they're competing as much as they need to?

This is the dumbest and most unproductive interpretation of what I said. But sure, it’s true I suppose.

Its a summary of your argument's logical conclusion. You might want to reflect on that instead of the vitriol.

I admit it’s true, it just has no value.

You can say it about any govt in the world. Oh I guess some people still live in Iran/Russia so their govt is doing just fine.

It’s not true, but it’s not insightful nor actionable. That’s why it’s dumb

My life is good, thanks to the booming tech industry. And as other comments said, the weather is great for me. Indeed, mediterranean weather is a godsend. There was a reason that Greeks and Romans had leisure to come up with foundations of modern civilization.

I was not complaining about the life. I was just wondering how the government's behavior fits the narrative of competing for residents vs business. Of course, I'm angry about the quality of education in California or the corruption in government in general, but that's not the point of my questions.

The Bay Area is a wonderful place to live if you're wealthy enough to avoid all the bad stuff and able to fly somewhere else whenever you feel like it. The tech company executives who make headquarters location decisions are that wealthy, and they prefer to have short commutes. Location decisions are made on that basis. They don't much care about quality of life (or lack thereof) for regular employees. In most cases they are completely disconnected from the struggles that other Bay Area residents go through with schools and housing; it just doesn't register with them.

My advice to most young people starting their careers is to avoid the Bay Area unless you honestly have the potential to quickly get up near the top of the income distribution. It will continue as a key tech industry hub but for most people there are better options now.

> They don't much care about quality of life (or lack thereof) for regular employees.

But many talents do stay in the Bay Area and many startups grew to become giants too. So, I'm not sure it's a one-sided decision by the wealthy. And I'm not sure about now but before 2010, very few people outside of the Bay Area knew how to build distributed systems. Case in point, IBM tried to build an auction system to compete with eBay's, and they couldn't figure out why eBay could support such a large throughput with subsecond latency. And in the first few years since http://highscalability.com launched, most of the shares came from the companies in the Bay Area.

There were plenty of people outside the Bay Area who knew how to build distributed systems before 2010. But a lot of that was in secretive industries such as defense and finance so you never heard about it.

>California also has the higher tax for income and business than most of the other states.

Is this a bad thing? It is true that California has high marginal rates, but for most people that isn't what matters. The progressive rates are more favorable, and from a policy perspective this creates more economic opportunity. For instance a married couple making $125k a year(bay area median) would have $4300 less in take home pay in Oregon.

>public schools have super low standards and low teaching qualities

Six of the top ten school districts in the state are in the bay area. https://backgroundchecks.org/top-school-districts-in-califor...

If you don't mind living in a studio apartment for 2-3x the cost of a house rental in Oregon.

> Six of the top ten school districts in the state are in the bay area.

This is because the majority of the parents in the tech industry in Bay Area are tiger parents or 24x7 helicopter parents. I kid you not, in a lunch with random tech workers there you will find 9 out of 10 are PhDs from elite universities. The parents themselves are overachievers, and they push their kids really hard. They know every EC, every competition, every course track. They send their kids to tough tutoring schools like AOPS and Think Academy, if they don't get multiple private tutors for their kids. They certainly compete for those elite summer camps. In addition, people with less means, such as manicurists and housekeepers, would pool their resources to find private tutors for their kids in their big families. On the other hand, teachers in Cupertino school district ask parents to grade homework (WTF!). The physics teacher of the kids of NASA's director ask questions like "which one is heavier, a pound or a kilogram" in grade 8 physics exams (WTF!). In the meantime, some school districts try to forbid students from taking algebra 2 or geometry in grade 9 in the name of equity. This makes me especially sad, as brilliant kids who can't afford tutoring will be deprived the rights to be properly challenged, all in the name of so-called equity. But I digressed.

If you're in one of the older areas (SF, Berkeley, Oakland) it's one of the few places on the west coast you can live an urban lifestyle in a walkable city.

This is just patently false. There are lots of major metros in the US that are plenty urban and walkable. SFBA is desirable because Google is there and willing to pay any amount of money for real estate.

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