Comment by mildtrepidation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mildtrepidation | Hacker News Reader

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mildtrepidation

(Honestly, I have a difficult time taking any developer who doesn't live here seriously, but that's a different discussion.)

That's lovely. People outside your precious bay area don't have any sort of interesting insight (It's a Jeep thing; you wouldn't understand)? Your whole rant is pretty hilarious in this context.

...in fact just outright insulting whole people and companies...

Yes, by all means. Attack the person you're replying to right before you dismiss all developers outside of your little geographical echo chamber as inferior.

Finally, I'd like to apologize on behalf of all the stupid foreigners (read: non-Bay-Area-ites) who are offending you so badly with our deplorable misuse of the voting system. You're right; we're simply afraid that you're cutting down our sad little misconceptions about the big, scary world (which, of course, comprises solely the place where you live, as nothing else really matters).

I'm not sure if you understand it, but your attitude is a big part of the reason some of us would never, ever move there. I'm sure you find this just peachy, which would also be your own failure.

A) parentheticals are aside comments

B) I'm not saying that all outside programmers are inferior. I'm saying that, given a uniformly random sample of Bay Area vs. outside programmer, I would expect the Bay Area programmer to be "better" for some set of objective measures.

If you don't think that, then you also have to disagree with basic market dynamics. Good programmers can earn more money here, and expose themselves to significant upside opportunities -- both social and financial -- which simply cannot be offered in the same quantity elsewhere. So if you show me a programmer who doesn't live in a place where they are exposed to those opportunities, I have to conclude one of only a few options:

1) not a good enough programmer to work at a company where they would be exposed to those opportunities

2) too risk-adverse or pessimistic to believe that they could leverage those opportunities, such that the cost of living here would be outweighed by the potential benefits -- which, if that is what this person believes about themselves, then perhaps #1 also applies

3) extreme aversion to city or suburban living? Or severe miscalculation of the cost-benefit of living here.

Certainly there are some cases where people who don't live here -- the center of the universe as far as technology careers are concerned -- are actually very highly skilled and leveraging those skills in their own communities. John Carmack doesn't live here, nor does Matz.

But I think you have to admit that those are exceptional cases. The average case is that you have an average programmer -- how else do you interpret the decision not to live in a place which affords objectively superior upside scenarios?

I'm not sure if you understand it, but your attitude is a big part of the reason some of us would never, ever move there. I'm sure you find this just peachy, which would also be your own failure.

Yeah I get it and I'm sorry for offending you. But I think there are certainly some realities at play, and one of them is that not all places attract talent equally. Nobody bats an eye if I said "community theater in Peoria does not attract the best acting talent," somehow that's an obvious statement -- of course if one was truly talented they'd have found a more rewarding stage.

Why is the same principle upsetting when applied to your own profession? Talented developers will find their way to the place which best rewards them. The biggest rewards tend to be available in the SF Bay Area. Ergo, to the extent that talent and compensation, opportunity etc are correlated -- the better talent is found here.

Finally, I'd like to apologize on behalf of all the stupid foreigners...

This is an unnecessary reaction. I think you must know what I'm saying here is that the voting seems to have a tendency to indicate popular sentiment, and not thoughtfulness, or insight. Consequently, it tends to punish provocative or controversial statements.

Just living in the US alone is objectively inferior by many criteria.

I'm not sure it makes sense to insult a nation (one that happens to be extraordinarily diverse in most every respect) in response to one person presenting a lacking argument.

Your blanket statement is equally valid when applied to every country on earth.

How am I insulting a nation? Just pointing out it's absurd to come up with that reasoning and decide most developers that decide not to live in the SF Bay Area isn't good enough or too pessimistic. I don't find it insulting some people may prefer e.g. Europe over the US and that alone doesn't seem indicative of their development capabilities.

Those are really all of the options that you can enumerate for a developer not choosing to live in the Bay Area?

Honestly, every response you've written on this thread makes me cringe.

What are some others?

I'll try to explain my main reason.

Imagine you're a lumberjack. Now imagine that everywhere you go, every day, all you hear about is trees, chain saws and axes. Most of your friend's social lives seem to revolve completely around lumberjacking. And there are no girls.

I can completely understand a founder's choice to live there. As an employee, it's not my cup of tea.

It's funny, but that's a caricature.

I have as many non-tech friends as engineers -- only a small percentage of the population work in this field here. There are also plenty of girls, many of whom are attractive, both within and outside the field. I mean, that latter point you can just verify by going on something like okcupid.

I would lump your response into pessimistic, based on insufficient information. Fundamentally it's one of the few I listed. The only other reason I can think of, which I may not have mentioned, is perhaps someone values very strongly living where their family is, and they are willing to suffer the opportunity cost of doing so.

I'm exaggerating for comic effect. But I lived in SF for six months so I feel that I'm somewhat entitled to an opinion.

Yes, there are girls. I dated a few. But the ratio is pretty bad and most of them are tired of ubiquitous tech guys. I sometimes felt embarrassed to even mention that I work in tech. Maybe that's my problem.

Yes, well... dating does not get much easier regardless of where you go. And the same dynamics apply to attractive girls as to talented developers -- more of them will be in bigger cities, and your chances of meeting them will be higher.

Accordingly, competition and selectivity will naturally go up -- you'll have to be creative!

You forgot (4) -- doesn't like the idea of living in the U.S.

Having a great job in a great city with warm weather is nice and all, but that's a fragile little bubble. To my sensibilities, the U.S. society, government, media, and military is a crazy disaster.

He forgot a million other options too. At one point, I wasn't a Silicon Valley worker because I preferred to live near family.

At present, I don't even know if I should be personally offended or not -- I technically work in Silicon Valley, but I live on the other coast, where the cost of living is dramatically lower.

That isn't to say his remarks weren't offensive either way, because basing a programmer's quality on something as arbitrary as where someone happens to live seems pretty naive.

I offer you the opportunity to open your company's office in whichever city you prefer -- I'll bankroll the first three years of rent. Work on the hardest, most challenging thing you think you can deliver, which also can actually deliver real value to your customer -- i.e., solve a difficult and useful problem. I'm also paying for the first few years' salaries of your early employees.

Where would you open your office and why? Do you think the location of your family would be an important factor in determining the likelihood of success? Sure, you might be happier there -- are you going to be able to fill the 20 most important roles in your with high quality people?

There are probably a small few fields where it makes sense to not be over here. The rest, you're probably going to have a difficult time rationalizing not picking SF/SV.

He forgot a million other options too

I forgot maybe two important, distinct reasons which don't fold into the ones mentioned. Valuing family time higher than financial opportunities being one of them.

From now on, any business that I create will be seeded with remote talent. Even if talent is local, the business processes will be optimized to allow seamless remote work. The benefits are just too great.

See 37 Signals and Art & Logic.

I'll grant that SV probably has the most favourable funding environment.

Case in point: recently I've been looking at art talent, and the difference in quality between paying market rates for Disney-quality talent vs. hitting up my professional network and friends is just astounding.

Biggest rewards available in SV? Hah. Maybe if you want to do fluff "social" and web work, or if you count money as the only reward available.

True -- I only count as rewarding: access to money, investment opportunities, arts, music, food, technology, a cosmopolitan scene, temperate climate and practically every biome within a few hours' drive.

And I only count as work: consumer applications, enterprise software, data storage and processing, law enforcement, intelligence, defense, robotics, aerospace, electric cars, manufacturing, real estate and some other fluff.

What do you guys work on over there? How are you rewarded?

> I'm not saying that all outside programmers are inferior. I'm saying that, given a uniformly random sample of Bay Area vs. outside programmer, I would expect the Bay Area programmer to be "better" for some set of objective measures.

And I'd expect that given a uniformly random sample of say.... Seattle vs Bay Area programmers I would expect the seattle programmer to be "better". But then again, both of our expectations are meaningless without real data.

> If you don't think that, then you also have to disagree with basic market dynamics. Good programmers can earn more money here, and expose themselves to significant upside opportunities -- both social and financial

And then you clearly do not understand that market dynamics don't exist in a vacuum considering salary alone. And are really only meaningful when considering salary in terms of buying power. And considering the cost of living in the bay area, there are many places where a programmer can make more "buying power" thus giving them the actual significant upside opportunities you suggest.

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