The winning employee strategy was to pivot into either SV based firms or biotech about a decade ago.
The decline of Dell+EMC, Akamai, and VMWare+CarbonBlack also seemed to have play a role.
That said, there are good Boston area VCs like General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Fidelity Ventures, but at this point they've all basically moved to concentrate on identifying talent at Harvard+MIT who were already going to move West or to NYC.
I hoped Klaviyo would have had a significant impact, but it seemed fairly muted for the size of exit it was. Same with it's ancestor Hubspot.
And filthy rich.
What I'm saying is you don't see the same kind of circulation between established companies, founding your own company, working for a startup, and/or becoming an Angel or VC like you would in the West Coast or increasingly in the NYC scene.
I felt like I got into this for the promise that coworkers would start new businesses and there would be all of this opportunity and none of that has materialized.
Granted, I worked with Tom Lehman before he founded Genius, but that's a pretty singular case. And another coworker from that job founded a chain of kickboxing gyms. I guess I have loads of ex coworkers who founded crypto scam shit over the years though, but the vast majority of people just moved up corporate ladders.
Maybe things would be different if I worked in SV, but my experience with tech in NY/DC has generally been that it's dominated by an extremely risk-averse group of the silver-spoon class on one side and get rich quick schemers on the other.
I'd agree to a certain extent with regards to the East Coast tech scene. It definetly feels much more immature than what you would see out West (Seattle and Austin have startup scenes similar in operational mindset to the Bay Area/SV scene).
If you contrast this with modern tech workers, while you can get the experience in multiple ways - you can only get the compensation at large firms. Few startups pay well enough to give employees financial freedom.
Add to this, many “startups” are simply small businesses that are pretending to grow and be tech focused.
Also with a job board, there seems to be a natural progression—the most valuable asset you can have is that the dummies and the useless resume-optimizers haven’t figured out how to game your system yet. So if anything there’s a huge incumbency disadvantage.
The job markets are dead, just look at the last few months of layoffs across the board. First the Russian invasion and the resulting inflation plus the end of ZIRP, then the Trump tariff wars.
That’s not a proxy anymore. In my corner, I keep seeing the same listings over and over again. Friends with hiring power have all sorts of stories, multiple reorganizations, budget cuts (and then a week later announcing record profits on earnings calls).
Companies are just not hiring. They need to say they are to keep investors on the hype (if you aren’t hiring you mustn’t be growing).
Cycles take longer and are more annoying but companies are definitely hiring.
Many of these "open positions" aren't really planned to be filled. They're just out there to gauge interest or wait for the one "rockstar" candidate.
Honestly, this kind of deception should be banned by law. So much time is wasted every year applying to jobs that practically aren't real.