All exaggerated I think - the cluster of universities and connections in the Bay is what feeds the beast. Owners have the luxury to move out of California personally, and some companies will move out later in their cycle, but others will keep being created.
The real risk to everyone is monopolization.
I am very worried about monopolization, especially of restaurants.
I hate it when people have clearly finished eating and won't give up the table.
I've never been to either Austin or San Antonio, but I too wonder about where workers will be located at. I'm told we are unlikely to be required to ever go back to the office full time. But I don't think I'd be allowed to fuck off to rural Vermont and keep the same job. Assuming bars open back up, I won't go to the suburbs because of the drunk driving problem getting home.
I guess I could go to central PA and live with the scenery and the fuckheads. Or West Virginia.
Inflow/outflow seems like the wrong way to measure this. In City A, fifty techies enter, thirty techies leave. In City B, two techies enter, one techie leaves. [THUNDERDOME]. City B has the higher inflow/outflow ratio but City A is what's up.
I've heard good things about Madison, but never been
there either. Miami is obviously doomed to flood so I've just been ignoring it.
One of the giant tech companies in Seattle has -- I hear -- decided that remote working is going well enough that they are probably not going to require people to come into the office regularly, but employees have to be within 4 (3?) hours' drive of an existing office. The idea is partly that this allows in-person meetings when they seem useful and largely that IT support can still be done by staff at their own benches on the company network, no mailing security-risk laptops around in a hurry.
And no-one thinks being 4 hours away all the time will be a good office-politics move for everyone. Having it be possible for everyone for a while at least seems pretty good though.
What Seattle will do with the freed-up office space is certainly not clear to me. The cranes are still up! Construction is still going! Amazing.
In my business, I am a tech worker but I can't find/afford to hire other people who are tech workers My solution has been to find workers and train them in tech.
I am waiting for all universities to act on the idea that they can double or triple their classroom capacity if they grant each class one F2F meeting time per week and the rest over zoom. Zoom licenses are much cheaper than new buildings.
11: But if I can't have a building named after me, then why should I give money to my alma mater?
Introduction to Calculus lectures will be held in the Princess Fluffykins Hussein Obama Zoom meeting room.
Exaggerated, but there seems to be something real there.
My company moved our customer service from SF to Orlando a few years ago, and opened an office in Denver that is now where the majority of our coders are.
I expect us to announce perma-WFH early next year, and expect a lot of other tech companies will, too. And once you're there, you care a lot less about where your workers are.
I think there's a lot of steam left in the Bay Area for tech - it takes a while to run that down. But between this, 403B and university changes making the US less attractive to ambitious people elsewhere, and the general rise of expertise in other places, it seems like the Bay has competition.
I have already kvetched to low-level LI people about this IRL, but I feel compelled to note here: It's very hard not to see this as classic GIGO data. I look at this kind of data pretty routinely and to me LI's graph is one (robust) step up from those dumb surveys that companies do to dress up their press releases ("One in three new moms has considered switching to a buzzcut during quarantine! ....Buy our haircutting device").
I'm being cranky, and there are (from what I can tell as an outsider) a lot of good, smart *people* involved in the creation of this tool, but I just don't think it's ready for prime time. And at least some folks at LI are super-defensive when they get called out on how unrepresentative their dataset is.
I want to set up a marketing campaign for my little city to get some of these remote tech workers to move here. We are two hours from Boston, charming AF, and you can still buy a single-family home for under $200K. Getting some tech worker salary money circulating in the economy would be huge for us.
I suppose it is true that housing costs burden everyone including tech, and the network effects only compensate for so much.
Wait, is San Antonio getting pre-ruined before I ever even see it?
Epic has been around Madison for decades (in the now-gold-plated suburb of Verona, n.b. all Madison suburbs are exurbs except Middleton); my sources tell me it has spawned a small cottage industry of people offering their services to help Epic clients use the terrible software. There are stories about Epic's CEO but I'd have to go looking. Wisconsin will not fare too poorly under climate change, but tons of its beautiful trees will die in droughts, and income inequality will keep spiraling up. There are very good restaurants in Madison, except Harvest. Milwaukee should have become a hipster capital long ago and I think the moment has passed. I have spoken.
18 Take it from me, those folks buying a bunch of houses might not be the best thing.
My dad remembered his year in Milwaukee fondly. Something about finishing his homework on the streetcar.
I agree with Witt in 17 about the validity of the data, but sent this along to HG anyway to see LK's reaction in 20.
Anyway, I didn't read the article to save time.
Anyway, I didn't read the article to save time.
|| Have you folks seen the far right wing's freak-out over Chief Justice Roberts? OK, there are always nuts and cranks going on about such folks, but the strange thing about our time is that half of the political establishment is increasingly forced to not only tolerate, but join in the madness. How far away are we from US Senators calling on the CJ to resign? |>
26: Would be really nice if that catalyzed some thinking on the right wing of the judiciary about whether they want to spend the rest of their lifetime appointments as creatures of an intellectually bankrupt political party.
18/21: Only good if you're prepared to build the necessary compensatory housing supply.
18: Tempting! But for random personal reasons I'd be somewhat more tempted by Greenfield.
26: you mean linking him to Epstein, or something even nuttier?
AIHMHB I got a tour of the Epic campus with a friend who has a non-tech job there. It was quite something. I actually took pictures of the carpet because they reminded me of heebie's hotel carpet pictures and I thought she'd love to see them.
Did I repress that memory or did it happen offline?
But for random personal reasons I'd be somewhat more tempted by Greenfield.
Greenfield has the train line, which is huge. We're a bit more isolated out here.
Only good if you're prepared to build the necessary compensatory housing supply.
We've got acres and acres of post-industrial land near downtown that is crying out for redevelopment.
Houses are for suckers. If you live within a few hours drive of Vermont, you can get cheerful young granola-types to come and install a yurt.
I mean, there are other yurt makers, but Two Girls Farm and Yurts seemed like the best value when I did the research.
The yurts they make in Vermont are shit. If you want a good yurt, you got to buy one made in NH.
Also, a yurt sounds really fucking cold about now.
Google says the yurts I mentioned are from New Hampshire.
36: is it zoned for housing? I have no idea what you're state's land use regime is like, but often in practice underdeveloped industrial or commercial sites are zoned allowing residential in theory, but in practice requiring project-by-project negotiations with the city, which tends to bog things down. Much better to zone by right for the kinds of projects you want to see, make sure they pencil out in the generic, and then it's a lot simpler to get it all moving, both business-wise and bureaucratically.
Is zoning a thing in New Hampshire? If you let your neighbor tell you what to build, you may as well go live in Massachusetts.
At least in incorporated cities, free-enterprise conservatives tend to be the most gung-ho of all to "preserve" "neighborhoods" and oppose housing.
If Orange County is any guide, at least.
Its a small city, we can handle zoning changes. We are in the process of a big upzone right now.
The problem isn't zoning, the problem is that the owner of the property is an asshole.
Epstein, yelling at the others, blackmailed by Brennan -- basically whatever you want.
OT: Asking for reasons related to a Harrison Ford movie, how many bullets can you fire from inside a plane without crashing the plane, even a really big one?
The CSI Miami guy just took one for Harrison Ford.
, how many bullets can you fire from inside a plane without crashing the plane, even a really big one?
Seven. The rule they design to is one more bullet than a standard revolver. Its a bit of an outdated standard because no one uses revolvers anymore.
I'm just thinking that if you shoot down the length of a plane with an submachine gun, you're going to hit something needed to control the plane before you can get to Harrison Ford.
Is this Air Force One? Because I think Air Force One is bulletproof.
They kept shooting through doors and walls.
Yeah, things were pretty chintzy in the Ford Administration.
And just when you think William H. Macy will survive to see his daughter get into college by bribery ... bang.
18: Are these nice houses? Maybe I should move. I know Tim has coworkers in NH. How far to a MA. Commuter rail line? I will be required back in the hospital at some point and can't afford to park in Boston.
Spike - can you send me an e-mail with the name of your actual city?
I have an irrational love for this house.
https://www.redfin.com/MA/Beverly/584-Hale-St-01915/home/8221626
It is On the edge of a chi chi part of town with fancy summer residences, but I keep fantasizing about creating an apartment to rent out (since it's zoned as a 2 family) for below market rate to help with the taxes and renovations. Not sure what to do with the storefront.
Of course, the train station within walking distance has really low ridership and they are talking about closing it because of the pandemic,
Re the OP title, so that's what kids are calling it these days.
The OP title makes me feel old and well out of the mainstream.
Isn't the song itself old and well out of the mainstream at this point?
58 - sent. Its the biggest city in southwest NH and the eleventh largest municipality in the whole state.
49: the original interceptor fighter concept was based on a requirement to shoot down an enemy aircraft within the 2 seconds the pilot was expected to be able to track the target and lead adequately, and that worked out to 320 rounds from 8 .30 calibre machine guns. in war that turned out not to be enough and everyone moved to 20mm cannon with explosive shells. The AIM-9X air to air missile uses 20lb of high explosive, so I think you'll be up there all night....
It's worth remembering that you hit the plane with 100% of the shots you fire from inside it.
Unless you have the door open and are still shooting, which happened a few times.
It's worth remembering that you hit the plane with 100% of the shots you fire from inside it.
If your bullet hits somebody inside the plane that's different from hitting the plane.
If you're not using bullets that go through, then you have no business shooting up a plane.
I'm not suggesting you need to avoid all gun fights inside airplanes. I'm suggesting that if you are trying to find somebody hiding on a plane, maybe you shouldn't shoot through walls as your first option.
If Boeing says gunfights on airplanes are OK, that's good enough for me.
Anything up to .38 caliber and you are good.
I'm not an expert or anything, but it looked like mostly 9mm.
This long interview with an AWS worker was making the rounds this morning. Among far more interesting bits (e.g. "Prime Video is a loss leader for Jeff's sex life"), he mentions:
Increasingly, large tech firms use people in developing countries as a disposable white-collar workforce. Smaller shops do too. A lot of startups will have one CTO in the Bay Area, and then they'll have their whole development shop be in Ukraine or Romania or something.
I have no idea (yes, I could google to find out) if this is actually "increasing," but it is a thing, and it strikes me that moving even one or two time zones forward from Seattle or California will double the number of tolerable morning meeting times you can schedule with your team in Bucharest or Lviv, let alone Russia. So the flyover states have that going for them too.
For what it's worth, the next paragraph would seem to contradict that "increasingly..." part:
But when funding dries up for startups and companies have to shutter, then all of their digital operation overseas is cut loose. And the people who lose their jobs go into cybercrime. They think, "There's no other options for me. So sure. Let's do it. Lock and load.
He's probably bullshitting, but this picture of superfast boom/bust cycles is awfully weird. Maybe cybercrime is just growing far faster than development outsourcing? I suppose that's not hard to believe.
Some startup that supplied cut-price African CS people for startupsfolded a couple of months ago for lack of demand.
And my fondness for Opera was diminished, before its sellout to China, by its reliance on programmers in Cracow.
So many of the best developers and development shops come out of Eastern Europe. I think the communist-era focus on math and science in the educational system really left a mark.
It's far from new. Remember Megaupload? Based in the provinces of Romania. Skype (when it was interesting)? Developed in Estonia. IIRC either Romania or Bulgaria had an electronics specialization assigned to it as part of COMECON planning.