How Silicon Valley's Tech Reign Will End | Hacker News Reader

How Silicon Valley's Tech Reign Will End

theatlantic.com

14 pointsjseliger9 comments

This fluff piece doesn't quite make sense. The tech sector is and has been for some time spread across most areas of the greater Bay Area. While nothing North of Menlo Park or in Alameda county is part of the "Silicon Valley," the latter is just a PR term. Tech companies are densest from SF down to San Jose. "Silicon Valley" is neither a distinct geographical nor an economic unit.

There are some "sociological" differences across areas in that range with respect to the types of the companies and types of employees. Ignoring those trends to cause staffing problems, e.g. building a new consumer web company in South is rather hard, while trying to start a new semiconductor company in SF would be challenging to say the least. Many people immigrate here without understanding that, and problems ensue.

The "San Francisco Bay Area" is a large and diverse region with a population of roughly 6 million. About 10% of those people are directly involved at tech companies, and about 5% are the hard-to-find developers, product managers, testers, etc. Sadly this one minority sector of the economic absolutely dominates most sub-regions here, and it's economic power is so much greater than all the other people together, that a host of problems arise.

The presence of the bay and the surrounding hills also kinds of screws things up. Space is limited, and travel between certain areas can be time-consuming. If you consider that roughly 1/3 of the people currently residing in the Bay Area currently are not from here originally, then throw in the vast economic changes tech caused over the last 30 years, you can start to appreciate that maybe long-term planning for the present state wasn't quite manageable.

In any event, the rhetoric about "sovereignty" and its similes is always self-serving and posturing. Decentralization of tech, or the decentralization of L.A.'s entertainment industry for that matter, would be a boon to everyone. Only self-important people who want to believe that their region or state or country or village is the center of the freaking universe fail to accept that. It would be better for everyone if the Bay Area were simply one of a set of 20 or so equally large and vibrant centers of tech.

Yes, it reads like it could have been a press release for Bruce Katz's new book.

I apologize for this low-value comment, but I got hung up on "most smartest." I suppose it won't be long before that is considered acceptable.

Yeah, I did too. I wanted to leave a comment along the lines of "Most smartest? I thought this was the Atlantic..."

It seems that the ever-improving remote collaboration capabilities should enable tech employees to spread out of these isolated, high-rent silos and base themselves where-ever is convenient.

If I wanted to live in Ohio on a farm and work at Google or Facebook or some startup, why should that be a problem? Assuming a fast and reliable internet link (a big assumption for some areas, I understand), combined with video chat, real-time document tools, and even those new remote-worker collaboration robots (I forget what they are called), it seems like the benefit outweighs the cost in almost every way.

I understand that founders need to network with VCs and Angels, and so that drives centralized locations, but even so, if I had a good pitch, why couldn't I just travel to meet them and then return to base my startup in Ohio (or wherever), hiring top tech workers remotely, be they in the vallery, SF, NY, or the Yukon Territory (again, that thing about the internet connection...)

1. The VCs don't want to drive to Ohio when something comes up 2. It's important for teams to be physically together to facilitate better communication and forge a sense of community and solidarity. Without actually knowing their coworkers and managers, your employees may not develop loyalty to your company and are unable to benefit from workplace social life.

"If I wanted to live in Ohio on a farm and work at Google or Facebook or some startup, why should that be a problem?"

That's fine depending on the circumstances and what you are doing.

But keep in mind that by working in the home office you also would generally make a longer lasting impression in theory and also make more contacts that could come in handy in the future [1]. Also it's easier to fire someone out in the field than it is if they are at the office (where they interact and everybody is generally more aware of "what's up".) Now of course none of this might matter today and with what anybodys job is in particular but it could matter.

[1] People who know you by face and personality not just by name or by video chat. It's not the same experience or "connection".

It is very misleading, if not downright dishonest, to claim that Silicon Valley cities "aren't having a construction "boom," when actual construction tells us otherwise.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_21274644/rents-rise-s...

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/video/8986205-construction-...

The article title is kind of misleading. When I see "Silicon Valley" in a headline, I interpret it as metonymy. So I thought the article was predicting the doom of the internet startup industry, not the valley as a hot location for startups. Such a "so what?" article.

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