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Comment by TwistedWeasel | Hacker News Reader

The article assumes that the best people to hire are twenty-somethings that want to live in the city. What about catering to the 30 and 40 something senior engineers? In my experience it's much easier to hire a newly graduated, smart young engineer than it is to hire somebody with 10+ years experience.

Those people may have a family, and would much prefer a suburban home in a good school district.

Apple isn't part of the tech _startup_ scene, it's been around a long time and they know the value of retaining experienced engineers.

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Those people may have a family, and would much prefer a suburban home in a good school district.

For the last 50 or so years, "urban" has always had the property "bad school district." I wonder how preferences would change if urban school districts were functional, or at least more functional than most of them are now.

In addition, safe and functional urban neighborhoods tend to be expensive because of zoning (see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City for more on this). What would happen if we had cities in which housing weren't so expensive?

One other issue with urban schools is that they're mixed --some good some bad, but often cities try to raise the performance of poor-performing students by 'busing' them to schools with students with aptitude. One, this adds uncertainty --is your pupil going to end up at your choice of school? Two, the students with poor aptitude often are not elevated by good aptitude students, so often this effort goes for naught.

Very true—and the WSJ, when it was still a good paper, had a long article about this dynamic in Seattle: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116519951912839643.html . As far as I know, however, busing is more or less over in Seattle, such that most parents can figure out based on housing locale where their kids are going to go to school.

Seattle is actually set up fairly well for this. While it isn't painless to commute between Seattle and the east side, it is certainly simpler to do so than commute to/from San Francisco and its suburbs. We are located in Bellevue and we have a pretty good split between people who live in Seattle and people who live on the east side.

>For the last 50 or so years, "urban" has always had the property "bad school district." I wonder how preferences would change if urban school districts were functional, or at least more functional than most of them are now.

There is also the question: What is a good school district?

Are the schools themselves the actual cause of high test scores or the involved parents? How much does it matter if there are some low performers at your school if YOUR kids are learning fine?

In general yes, but as a someone who that fits that story arc, I find the dichotomy of insanely overpriced tiny city vs desolate parking lot, well, lousy. I love the idea of what apple is building but there is still no walkable / bicycle friendly place to live in the bay area. In central Tokyo i can cycle to work in less than 15 minutes or walk in 40. Or take one of the many many buses or trains departing every 2-4 minutes. Does that quality of city planning exist anywhere in the US? I have not seen it.

Down here in one of the Southern California suburbs, I can do the same 15 min bike or 40 minute walk to my office. Our school districts are excellent as well. There's no bus or train, but the parking is reasonably ample and free. (It's a 6 minute drive.)

For that, though, we lack virtually any sort of night life, and have very few non-chain restaurants/stores/etc. It's a great place to raise a family, but horrible to attract the "20-something Ruby Rockstar" developer, despite the 4-year university down the road.

there is still no walkable / bicycle friendly place to live in the bay area

This is just false; San Francisco is plenty walkable and public transit generally works quite well, despite the grousing you may hear from the people whom it has spoiled.

Berkeley and Palo Alto are both exceedingly walkable/bikeable as well (though taking public transit from Palo Alto to anywhere else can be a bit painful). This shouldn’t be surprising at all, since both have huge populations of people who generally don’t drive (students).

Fair enough, but when i lived there, every single person i knew had a car and real estate in SF is so astronomically expensive that none of my friends, all of them highly paid, live IN the city. So living in SF but never getting in a car doesnt seem realistic unless you dont mind never visiting your friends. I suppose that makes SF liveable without a car

Just out of curiosity, when did you live there?

I live in SF without a car and I'd be hard pressed to name three friends who do have a car.

I found Cupertino to be pretty bike friendly when I lived there many years ago, and I'm not even the typical demographic for bike commuting--I was the kind of person for whom you see and exclaim "what the fuck is that guy doing on a bike!?" Fat, and needed to have a custom rear wheel made with 48 spokes because ordinary wheels could not take my weight.

I went long stretches where I only used my car when I wanted to go to a different city or wanted to carry more cargo than would fit in my panniers.

Unless things have changed a lot (it has been quite a while) I'd expect Cupertino to be fine for the kind of people who are actually in shape for biking.

Some of us don't want kids. But we would rather live in a suburban or rural area. I work as a field tech, parking is a core requirement for any place I live, parking in the city is an incredibly rare or expensive quality.

Beyond that, I grew up in Los Angeles, the car culture is deeply baked into me, plus, my eventual intention is to live in a rural area - where I can have land to do things like solar power, growing my own produce and a nice workshop to futz around in when my heart desires.

It also comes down to rent, I need a vehicle because of my line of work, its a fixed cost I'll likely have to carry forever - rent in the city is upwards of twice as much (sometimes more) for the same space over suburbs, I cant justify the costs when I cannot otherwise expense shed elsewhere to make up the difference.

The article assumes that the best people to hire are twenty-somethings that want to live in the city. What about catering to the 30 and 40 something senior engineers?

If they move out to the suburbs, it's so they can afford a nicer and larger place. Silicon Valley is still ridiculously expensive and mediocre in terms of amenity. They tend to go to places like Portland or Austin rather than pay city prices to live in a suburb.

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