A massive tech company exodus occurring in Austin, Texas | Hacker News Reader

A massive tech company exodus occurring in Austin, Texas

mysanantonio.com

47 pointsvictor10694 comments

>But many startups are now choosing to leave the capital city they once flocked to because of the rising cost of living, low funding, and lack of diversity, according to TechCrunch.

No one leaves because of "lack of diversity": look at how Bellingham WA exploded in the last few years. Further, the VMware layoffs and Meta/Facebook and Google retrenchment are country-wide and not confined to only Austin.

What is more likely is that Austin, which saw a huge run-up in home prices, is just not as affordable as before. Add in quality of life things like longer commute times, and the end of ZIRP draining available funding...

WA is full of Asians. You claim it’s not diverse?

I've heard Asians are 'white adjacent' so maybe they don't count?

I've heard there are more than one type of Asian - more even than two types.

More even than just the Sama-Bajau and Minangkabau.

Who'd have thought, hey?

Does "diverse" just mean "not white"? If WA mostly "whites & Asian" then no - it is not diverse.

> Does "diverse" just mean "not white"?

In many cases, yes, it basically just means this. That's even a reasonable de facto definition for that term as it's used today, in any appearance without further qualification ("diversity of thought" e.g.)

Generally diversity means multi racial, ethnic, cultural not just “more than white”.

Bellingham is not particularly diverse, no. Bellevue on the other hand is incredible.

Mostly Gringos and a few Natives, predominantly Lummi Nation

Washington is not diverse. The state's Asian population does not rank in the top 5 in the nation.

I stated Bellingham, you may not have ever spent time there, but certainly it has grown as former Amazon people decide it is a nice place to be (it wasn't diverse when I was there).

Yeah, that felt entirely shoe-horned into this article. I couldn't find any further explanation within the article, or the parent article it references. Just pure assertion on the author's part.

If true, we'd also expect to see mass closures of eng offices in places like Tokyo, Shanghai or Mumbai due to their "lack of diversity."

All great points. I don't recall the valley being that diverse, nor is ... for example, Boulder, CO and they're still hot spots.

If tech is mostly "bro dudes", they're definitely not moving away from Austin due to "diversity or abortion rights". They moved to escape the CA state taxes & the politics of the area they left.

The article is trying to support an economic thesis with social / identity politic reasoning.

Dude if the valley is not diverse then I’m excited to see what diverse looks like! :)

Silicon Valley is only diverse if you count Asians as diverse. It’s also extremely segregated: my recollection from all the times I’ve been there was that it was only whites/Asians in tech and VC and other groups in service jobs. East Texas is better in that regard (quite integrated, I suspect because the oil industry is a source of good jobs for both whites and Hispanics). So is Atlanta, with its large affluent black population.

Lack of diversity in the sense of living under a state government aiming for 17th century christian theocracy as a role model of governance as opposed to more liberal states.

The model of governance may not be too your liking, and also be a bit heavy handed in some areas for my personal Christian beliefs - it is ok to have different belief systems... and let the states and citizens of the states decide where to live.

Something seems to be working well enough for most TXn's though.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, right? Texas has been that way for decades, and yet it’s a major destination for people leaving “more liberal states.” California was never as Christian, but it was solidly red through the 1980s, and was a major destination at that time as well. Same thing for Virginia, through the 1990s.

When my parents came to this country, they chose to live in a Virginia county that was so red a Democrat wouldn’t even run for the Congressional seat in some cycles. They could’ve moved next door to liberal Maryland, but they didn’t. I’ve never gotten a satisfactory explanation for that.

Virginia was a destination because the FedGov was spending boucoup money since the Reagan Era, and VA has a ton of Gov and Military presence. The inside of the state may be literally Liberty University level conservative, but the defense contractors moving there were generally well educated and voted blue -- and moved there to do lucrative contracting work.

Until recently, affluent, educated voters leaned Republican. That was certainly true of where I grew up in the 1990s in Northern VA.

Have you considered two other factors?

1) It's hot for any skin color, compared to most anywhere else in the country. Not everyone enjoys staying indoors for half the year (I have lived in TX.) Folks might move from coastal California and then learn that lesson the hard way.

2) If you are a woman, or woman adjacent, then the fact that religious extremists now set reproductive law might affect the desire to live in the state, if one has a choice.

TX is really only hot in.... mid-late summer. Even then, everyone just uses A/C and alters their patterns for that time. Just like up north, where it can be quite cold in the mid-winter, and people alter their patterns for 60 days.

I can put on warm clothes, and enjoy the outdoors in the cold. What is the equivalent in the heat? I have lived in both, and if you have a secret I would love to learn it.

People still mountain bike in Vegas, Arizona, TX etc during the summer - you might just go at night (for a night ride).

I personally just drank a lot of water for lunch rides (I'd take a gallon for a ride) and electrolytes. Favorite time to ride, trails were empty.

Sounds like a good time, kinda. But, if you are a young tech working family, I am not sure if this would make for a great family outing.

You are basically agreeing that you are stuck indoors for many months of the year, during day time.

Also, this last year, which was many people's introduction to the heat, it was much worse than just a couple months.

https://www.kxan.com/weather/weather-blog/austin-records-hot...

I too have lived in both, and there is none, as I remind my friends from hot as fuck climates whenever they complain about cooler weather. You can't go below "naked."

I just checked and Austin is over 90F for a full third of the year. Hard pass.

https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/austin/yearly-day...

I really dont see how these hot climates are any worse than corresponding northern cities. I live in Chicago and we dont leave our house for 5 straight months in the winter and then there are 2 more months where the weather is consistently shit. Is a summer where its consistently over 100 for 3 months worse than the 6 ish months of not going outside that northern cities see?

Tech companies were too myopic only trying Austin. The DFW Metroplex area of Texas has much more room and scale, and is more business-friendly, lower cost, and has a much larger professional class population.

John Carmack is a famous transplant here who has never wanted to move since. It's also a few degrees cooler than Austin - though with all the new pavement the urban heat island effect might even that out.

> is just not as affordable as before. Add in quality of life things like longer commute times,

Home prices are dropping like a rock. And commute times were hell a decade ago.

I think the bigger issue is that these firms bet big on real estate and then the pandemic suddenly clued people in that remote work was possible and now instead of admitting they made a mistake are blaming the issue “on Austin.”

Also: to speak to the diversity part. Read up on Austin’s 1928 plan to intentionally segregate the city. Austin is still one of the most racially segregated. In an interesting turn of events Houston (due to its lack of zoning laws making redlining hard to impossible) is the most racially diverse city in the nation. Amazing what impact a bunch of people a hundred years ago can have on a place even after they are dead and their laws changed.

> In an interesting turn of events Houston (due to its lack of zoning laws making redlining hard to impossible) is the most racially diverse city in the nation.

In a nation that includes, amongst other cities, New York City, this is extremely unlikely.

https://abc13.com/houston-diversity-wallethub-most-diverse-c...

New York was famously segregated by Robert Moses. It’s up there on the list due to being a welcoming and diverse destination today, but those policies of the past can be felt today, long after they are gone.

You can click through to the actual list here: https://wallethub.com/edu/most-diverse-cities/12690

It's worth taking a look at their methodology and how they're measuring diversity. Notably, NYC ranks much higher than Houston for cultural diversity (#5 vs #28 for Houston).

If you slice the numbers differently you get a different result.

But the fact that Houston is even in the list in the first place is the interesting part. Whether it beats NYC or not is sorta not the most important part of my comment.

It seems the Forrest might have been missed for the trees. (I don’t feel like you understood or validated what I said, whether you disagree with the precise methodology or not)

> No one leaves because of "lack of diversity"

Also known as "journalists just making shit up and passing their agenda off as facts."

Yeah kinda salty about northern WA has exploded. I'm nominally from there and think about moving back... but then a house costs just as much as much of the rest of the US so might as well stay where it's warm.

Considering that having a complication during pregnancy could now mean either jail time or death, I don’t know why any well off professional with options would choose to continue to live in Texas.

or they can take a 1 hour flight on southwest for like 50 bucks.

And then return home to a state where much of the populace, and the government consider them to be actual murderers.

Also, depending on the county they live in, anyone who helps them leave the state to have the medically required abortion may be breaking the law. Would this include the reservation agent at the airline? Sounds like it would.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/us/texas-abortion-travel-...

The eventual court cases over whether going to another state to do something legal is in fact illegal in your current state will be sad and interesting.

I’m going to go on a limb and say that a fetus will be counted under interstate commerce jurisdiction of the US Constitution so there will be a federal law level decision on whether abortion is illegal or not if one doesn’t exist already. Because then I’d imagine that supremacy clause means that states actually do not have the right to restrict procedures like abortions either.

In the Wickard v Filburn case the court ruled that a guy growing food on his own land to feed to animals on his own land was participating in interstate commerce. So it wouldn't be the first stretch of the term.

Likely unconstitutional for a number of reasons: - the constitution guarantees freedom of movement within the states. - the dormant commerce clause prohibits states from passing legislation that improperly burdens or discriminates against interstate commerce - states cannot pass laws with extraterritorial jurisdiction. The constitution establishes a federal system in which states have sovereignty within their own borders but cannot exert authority in other states.

But "states rights" are now a thing, somehow. Our Supreme Court has now shown a heavy political leaning, and the ability to discard precedent.

If I was a women, who according to my doctor, needed a medical abortion to save my life, what good is a multi-year appeal going to do me?

Innocent mothers will die from these laws, and future infertility will be caused.

If only somebody could have seen this coming.

Roe was nakedly political. Even liberals hardly defend it as an exercise in actual Constitutional law. It also remains an aberration in the developed world: the EU Court of Human Rights has repeatedly declined to recognize a general “right” to abortion that overrides the power of elected legislatures to regulate it.

The Supreme Court that showed a “heavy political leaning” was the one that decided Roe in the first place, not the one that overturned it, returning the issue to the public to decide, as is true in every country in the EU.

It's sad that you're getting downvoted when you're objectively right. Roe was the poster child for judicial activism where the justices literally invented a constitutional right out of thin air in order to justify their decision.

Sure, just have an ectopic pregnancy at 30,000 feet instead

"Emergency healthcare is just a flight to a neighboring state away, and you may be prosecuted when you get back" isn’t as much of a sell as you think it is.

Care to explain?

OP is referring to having to have an abortion in extenuating medical circumstances.

> The Texas Supreme Court on Friday night put on hold a judge’s ruling that approved an abortion for a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis, throwing into limbo an unprecedented challenge to one of the most restrictive bans in the U.S.

> Cox learned she was pregnant for a third time in August and was told weeks later that her baby was at a high risk for a condition known as trisomy 18, which has a very high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth and low survival rates, according to her lawsuit.

> Furthermore, doctors have told Cox that if the baby’s heartbeat were to stop, inducing labor would carry a risk of a uterine rupture because of her two prior cesareans sections, and that another C-section at full term would would endanger her ability to carry another child.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/texas-supreme-court-pa...

Imagine electing to live in a dystopia like Texas where you can detect situations like this but aren’t allowed to treat them.

Considering that having a complication during pregnancy could now mean either jail time or death, I don’t know why any well off professional with options would choose to continue to live in Texas.

> If this is a growing trend, it begs the question. What will Austin have to do to remain the darling of the tech world?

I moved to Austin in 2008. The locals had a “go home, we are full” ethos at the time.

Looking back in history, that same vibe shows up in the 90s, 80s, 70s and before.

So, it’s somewhat presumptuous of the author to assume that the people who lived here when I moved here or live here now ever desired to be the “darling of the tech world.”

The article also doesn’t mention all the hardware we had way before metafaceboinstagramoogle showed up. Amd and National Instuments and Dell. Not to mention Apple has a huge campus. Richard Garriot, creator of ultimate online and a ton of gaming shops are in town. We’ve got a major university, healthcare, and a diverse number of other industries already here.

Austin likes what’s in Austin (minus the grumpiness about traffic and regressive state politics). If Silicon Valley likes that too, cool. If not, I don’t think we’ll be worried about it too much. I’ll just keep remote working like I’ve been doing for the past decade+ and paddle boarding on the weekends.

Lived in Austin for most of my life and moved away as soon as I could due to Heat and traffic. It’s not an enjoyable place to live weather wise for most of the year. Basically you feel trapped at home either due to heat or don’t want to deal with traffic which I am sure by now is most the day.

Climate change is going to make that heat a bigger issue. Especially with the humidity.

The currently-linked article seems like a poorly worded and edited synopsis of the article at https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/07/is-the-texas-boom-town-of-.... Should that be linked at the top instead?

The supposed migration to Austin was always destined to reverse.

Austin is a mid-tier city when it comes to amenities, weather, food, and more. That works for a lot of people, including myself.

But for those established in places like the Bay Area, Seattle, or New York City - it’s a hard sell. Sounds like it took a few years for these companies to figure that out.

> many startups are now choosing to leave the capital city they once flocked to because of the rising cost of living, low funding, and lack of diversity, according to TechCrunch.

Texas in general is having brain drain. Some due to politics, some due to systemic factors that made the areas relatively less desirable in the past.

> lack of diversity

Also known as lack of cheap Indian labour

Its cheap thats for sure.

What makes you think Indian labor is cheap? I've worked with Indians all my life and they did not earn less than other workers at similar levels.

A left leaning drain, yes. But that doesn't mean the state is any worse or better intellectually than the influx that has been occurring into Texas for years.

This article presents anecdotes. The data on migratory trends show net population inflows to Texas (unlike California).

a river a poor and dumb heading in, while the well-paid and educated heading are out is not a good thing and does not bode well for the tax base.

> Texas in general is having brain drain

Nope it's just the usual politics and media sensationalism. There are plenty of smart people in well paying jobs in Texas like anywhere else with such a large overall population. Just because it's not like California doesn't make it undesirable for people and businesses. Pretty much the opposite actually.

> But many startups are now choosing to leave the capital city they once flocked to because of the rising cost of living, low funding, and lack of diversity, according to TechCrunch.

What a weird thing to say. What difference does the color of people’s skin make? I just got back from Tokyo—wouldn’t it be bizarre for me to complain that it was too uniformly Japanese? Would it be better if there were fewer Japanese people and more Indian people? Why exactly?

Lack of diversity == no good food

I'm not sure if that's actually true for Austin though.

I have a similar way of calling someone "low class". It is lack of manners that makes one low class, not lack of wealth.

Tokyo would beg to differ.

It's a USian thing. The default for diversity is Panda Express.

Because knowing and interacting with minorities tends to make people less racist. That's why there's a huge difference between the level of racism that minorities have to encounter between cities and small towns.

For example https://www.reddit.com/r/okc/comments/12vli29/black_family_m...

That seems circular. Also, I don’t think your premise is correct. For example, the kind of “diversity” that exists in San Francisco (where there is a sharp class divide between whites and Asians on one hand and blacks and Hispanics on the other) probably breeds racism, even if it’s a subtle kind: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen...

Also, your premise doesn’t match my experience, at least as a south Asian. I’ve never felt any racism or stereotyping in rural America. But I have in Toronto, where there’s a large underclass of south Asians. I’ve also experienced racism from other minorities in urban parts of the US. I think it’s quite possible that the conflict that inevitably arises when groups live alongside each other in the real world causes racism. I suspect the only exception to that is ethnically diverse places that are culturally and economically homogenous across ethnic lines. There’s virtually no places like that, pretty much anywhere.

I spent the last 30 minutes trying to edit an appropriate reply explaining my own immigrant experience. Then I deleted all of it. This is hard to respond to. I will try again:

> Also, your premise doesn’t match my experience, at least as a south Asian. I’ve never felt any racism or stereotyping in rural America. But I have in Toronto, where there’s a large underclass of south Asians.

With $500, my mother and 5yr old me left Soviet Poland and landed in Massachusetts. Upon landing, no matter how well I did in school, I was a "dumb Polak immigrant." [0] Later, when I was a teen, we moved to the West Coast, and there that stereotype did not exist. I was re-born. Yay! :)

In my experience, as immigrants to The West, we bring our own ridiculous class/race hatred straight here with us, and in the melting pot places like the East Coast for me, and Toronto for you, we can't escape it.. Like we left our continents because of that dumb crap, and somehow we brought it all here.

Imho, we are very fortunate that North America is so large, and innocent, so that we can all find a comfortable spot for ourselves, somewhere.

> ethnically diverse places that are culturally and economically homogenous across ethnic lines"

This seems circular to me. It is likely that I just don't understand. If you don't mind, please explain further.

[0] I would like to point out that my brother in law recently admitted to us that even as a teenager, he didn't know that Polaks were an actual group of people from an actual country named Poland. He literally thought that Polish were a theoretical group of dumb people. He grew up dirt poor in Kentucky, and has now worked his way to be a multi-millionaire. After all that, he could admit that level of ignorance to our Polish family, and we were all good.

This is the glory of "Western multiculturalism." Love it, or hate it.

Personally, I love it. I mean you can't make this stuff up, and we are all very lucky to be here.

In a way my experience was similar. I encountered no racism in the (at the time) very white Virginia town where I grew up. Nobody had stereotypes about Bangladeshis. That place now has a large foreign population, and ironically the only times I’ve encountered racism there are from foreigners (specifically Arabs).

So it doesn’t seem to me to be true that “diversity” makes people less racist. In particular, I don’t think people in places like San Francisco are less racist, where day in and day out they see certain groups only in service jobs while other groups work in tech and finance.

A really interesting data point on racism, in general, which I learned from Sapolsky (via Sean Carroll) is that using fMRI scans, it appears that most adult humans have a racist friend/foe type response when viewing photos showing "the other."

However, this visual response can be hacked with something as silly as the person in the image wearing a baseball cap from "our team." So, clearly racism is a really crappy heuristic. Learning this made me feel happy and sad at the same time... but I think mostly happy, because if that ugliness can be hacked so easily, then it must truly be nonsense.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/02/15/134-...

It's not a skin color question, it's a question of other cultural elements. For example: My Indian & Chinese friends & family enjoy having a deep community of friends, restaurants, heritage events, bilingual schools, etc. The school matter is particularly acute; virtually every community on the SF peninsula has Mandarin immersion programs. In San Jose, Asians are 38.1% of the population versus 8.4% in Austin.

These considerations are amplified for smaller cultural niches - e.g. Afghani, Vietnamese, Korean, French, etc. I'm sure Austin ranks high in (tech-weighted) diversity compared to other cities in Texas, but it probably doesn't hold a candle to SFBA & NYC.

(Note: Plenty to love about Austin. There are no silver bullets.)

I'm not sure what tech weighted diversity means. Number of Asian people? If you're looking at % white people Austin is the whitest city in Texas. SA, Houston, and Dallas all have less white people than New York or San Francisco.

It sounds like your friends aren't interested in diversity but specifically looking for the opposite. People that share a shared cultural heritage and language. Nothing wrong with that, but it's just weird to call that diversity.

> It's not a skin color question, it's a question of other cultural elements. For example: My Indian & Chinese friends & family enjoy having a deep community of friends, restaurants, heritage events, bilingual schools, etc

Sure. That’s why a lot of my family has moved to NYC or Dallas, because there’s large populations of Bangladeshis in those cities, and they can be around people who share their language and cultural background. But why would you care about that? (Why is it mentioned in the Tech Crunch article?)

And clearly skin color does have something to do with it. If you’re talking about culture and food, Austin is pretty “diverse” for a white person from the west coast.

The attitude of Texas feels very "maximize benefits for myself". That was the justification for most companies that moved there: lower taxes, regulations, low enforcement of workers' rights, etc. This helps in the short term but in the long term degrades quality and is a race to the bottom.

> If this is a growing trend, it begs the question. What will Austin have to do to remain the darling of the tech world?

Be in a state that has laws such that my wife would feel confident in her ability to receive competent medical care there.

which is a hard lift, for a city.

You have to imagine after this insanity with the women in Texas with a medically necessary abortion* that companies have to be rethinking hiring there (and women have to be rethinking living there frankly)

* https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2023/12/10/...

Among people I know here in Austin, who are all largely in the middle class, it's wildly assumed you'd just travel out of state if needed. It's a weird situation. The people who should be moving are people for whom an out-of-state abortion is financially impossible, but obviously, if you can't afford two to three days off work, a hotel and a plane ticket, you probably can't afford to move either.

But if you are in that situation, you can also probably just choose a better place to live where women have rights too.

This sounds like a dystopia where there is one set of laws for the wealthy and another set of laws for the less wealthy.

Yes, I know.. this is often the case in many countries, but when it comes to bodily autonomy[0], it sounds much worse to me. Does not sound like the land of free at all.

[0] According to recent TX news, this includes a women's right to maintain fertility, and even her own life. What in the actual heck?

"Sounds like" should just be replaced with "is". It is, objectively, a dystopia where laws apply only to one class of people.

While this post is flagged, I doth protest, my HN karma be dammed.

Here is a catalog of HN posts [0] about company moves regarding Texas, which were not flagged, or at least did not remain so. What makes this post different?

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

  “Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately”
  149 points|edward|4 years ago|274 comments

  Tesla’s Texas Move Is Latest Sign of California Losing Tech Grip
  59 points|Bostonian|2 years ago|84 comments

  Tech workers now doubting decision to move from California to Texas
  58 points|thunderbong|3 months ago|157 comments

  Hewlett-Packard Enterprise to Move Hq from San Jose to Houston Texas
  41 points|geogra4|3 years ago|2 comments

  Tesla to Move Headquarters to Austin, Texas, Musk Says
  16 points|dcgudeman|2 years ago|2 comments

  Tesla's move to Texas came after California legislator tweeted 'f-k Elon Musk'
  15 points|bryan0|2 years ago|1 comments

  Tesla will move California to Texas/Nevada due to local coronavirus response
  10 points|heshiebee|4 years ago|3 comments

comments about politics and diversity, most likely.

the article gave exactly zero figures to justify the title. just a few anecdotes

i don’t see anything that makes me think there’s a “mass exodus”

Yes, lots of truth by assertion in this article.

Something tells me that Austin locals won't be too upset about this, and in fact may even welcome this due to the huge run-up in housing prices and increase in traffic.

What makes Austin locals not happy about their houses gaining in value?

The fact that their next generation cannot afford to live in the same city and end up moving away. Or they decide to sell and do so themselves because all other costs have been higher. Eventually, there are no locals.

Related from earlier:

Is the Texas boom town of Austin losing its luster?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38591726

Reply on news.ycombinator.com