This is clearly written with the starting premise "How do I show that the Bay Area is no longer the best place". You can see the biases throughout the piece.
For example, the chart with the top tax rates. Yes it's technically true that the top rate in California is 13.3% for incomes over $1M. But then they used that tax rate against the "tax adjusted income" but the income was only $300K.
They also have subjective measures that unsurprisingly put the Bay Area lower on the list.
I'm not saying the Bay Area is the best, but I'm saying this analysis is flawed and biased.
Ah, shoot, I didn't mean to give that impression! I'm actually a big fan of the bay area and lived there for 7 years. I live in Austin now and think that the analysis made Austin appear too good. I need to dig deeper into why the job stats were so similar across cities because that doesn't pass sanity check for me.
When I lived in the Bay Area, it was a ball of stress to "keep up" the salary to be able to enjoy anything, as I wasn't being paid those "top salaries" everyone uses in their data summaries. I couldn't ever purchase a home, and these were important things to my lifestyle. I moved to Seattle and now I'm seeing these obscene pricing trends happening here (and with the worse weather, too, sigh).
I think the best city is the one where you find a sense of belonging and contentness. Data doesn't cover all the nuances of happiness.
When people make these comments, do they mean median rent for a 2 bedroom, or price per sq ft of a 4 bedroom home, or median home price, or what? Because any of those can distort the reality quite a bit, depending on what someone is looking for.
Sure the 'average' apartment in NY might be similar to the average apartment in Seattle, but does the latter have a full kitchen in a safer neighborhood while the former is a half kitchen in a rough neighborhood?
Is the average home price both 2M but one of them gets you a 4 bedroom house and the other gets a 2 bedroom condo?
Not to say that there isn't better reasons to live in NYC, but 'CoL' is hard to meaningfully capture by service level stats.
Tech didn't cause this, homeowners did. If it didn't have a high paying industry you'd see blight and disinvestment instead, as you're only left with retirees who don't care about that stuff.
Seattle has unusually good building codes (single-stair is allowed) but no income tax, so in that way it might not benefit from tech as much.
South Lake Union, West Seattle, and Bellevue must be the totality of your experience. Go up the hill and you’ll find a lively scene till about 3am year round, head downtown and you’ll see a dozen cultural events a week. I’m blown away by how many people project their depression and anxiety onto a large metro area without realizing it.
I live in Fremont. Can't make it to cap hill unless I spend $30 on Uber or parking, or take transit which will be 1.5 hours to go 6 miles (includes a transfer or two running late during a busy night). Or bike on the streets after sunset on our crazy hills.
Fremont is definitely its own thing which can really charming, but covid + the natural aging process definitely hit them hard.
Just a decade ago Fremont was a kind of cultural retirement community for the professional class in their 30s and 40s with an older generation of artists and small business owners. But now it's a retirement community for a lot of people in their 40s and 50s with school-age kids, and that older generation are either dead, retired, or priced out.
It's about an hour walk to Capitol Hill from Fremont and the walk around Lake Union is pleasant most of the year, but not so much in the winter. Driving to Ballard is probably your best option for nightlife around now, which I admit is pretty hit or miss.
So yeah, your perspective makes sense to me. Seattle has "at least one" year round nightlife neighborhood, but you're right that it's nothing like NY or Berlin where you have both full transit coverage and multiple districts to choose from.
I will agree that for the most part LA has SF beat on Asian food, but Cantonese/HK style Chinese is better in SF, and the rest is probably on par, just fewer options in SF.
But you nailed in on the head -- you have to find ethnic food made by people who know how it's supposed to taste and making it for people who know how it's supposed to taste. If I go into an ethnic restaurant I know it's good if the majority of the customers are that ethnicity.
Seattle seems to be more authentically Japanese than other places. I found a ramen booth place in Capital Hill like Ichiran where everyone eats inside a curtain.
SF Japantown feels old and rundown like nobody's moving there anymore.
Does anybody have a theory as to why Seattle's startup ecosystem is so bad compared to all of its other metrics?
I moved here a few years ago and it feels like the culture nudges people away from defining their life based on their work (compared to SF/NYC at least), but that feels like a generally handy-wavy explanation. Presumably there's enough MS + Amazon money floating around to get a decent angel/venture scene started.
It's because WA allows for non-compete agreements for employees above a certain income level, whereas CA bans non-competes outright. So it's much more difficult to get top/high-ranking people to leave MS/AMZN since they might get sued by their employer.
Note that the threshold in WA is around $116K annual salary and I imagine that most senior tech employees would be above this level.
And this is precisely why the law is so toothless in WA. It was intended to kill non-competes for low-wage workers (McDonald's workers, etc), not for tech workers. That's still a good thing overall, but techies don't really see the benefits of it.
Because given a choice, no one would want to do a startup in Seattle.
Seattle is a city of transplants who are only there because Amazon/MSFT brought them there.
It is a city that is enjoyed on a big tech lifestyle. Weekend get aways are amazing. The suburbs are nice as far as suburbs go. So the demographics that love seattle and ones that do startups are diametrically opposed to each other.
The city of Seattle itself lacks charm and appeal. The Scandinavian coldness merged with tech introversion makes it the loneliest tech city. Among tech cities, it has the worst weather (if I'm indoors all day, I want sun at will when I do go out).
I have lived in SF, Seattle, Boston and NYC. Seattle is easily the least "city" of the lot.
That being said, those same
traits make Seattle an amazing 2nd location for a startup.
It's really funny to read your comment as I take a break from my job working for a startup in Seattle, a city I love for its charm, friendliness, and comfortable weather!
Some of it is that H1-Bs can’t be founders and startups usually can’t secure visas, and Seattle is a smaller population overall with fewer developers coming from the metro area. The Bay Area and NY have some of the best STEM schools in the world right next door, all western Washington has is a pretty good public university (UW) with a CS program that’s been largely irrelevant to the tech scene until fairly recently.
I’ve gotten to know many talented non-us devs while working in enterprise but I can’t do a startup with them, couldn’t even hire them.
Their visa makes them indentured servants who will be deported if they’re doing anything other than working at a big company for the next 4-10 years. This exists in every city that’s big in tech, but in Seattle it’s a quantitative difference that becomes a qualitative difference. I’ve worked with at least a hundred developers in Seattle over the last decade and only three of them were from the region or attended undergrad here.
There's a good contingent of YC folks in Capitol Hill. I'm very interested in improving the Seattle startup scene and would love to grab a coffee or chat.
How many of those Seattle roles are for Amazon and Microsoft?
What's missing here when selecting the "Best City" is what sort of variety is there in the market? Surely you don't want to feel as if you have to stay at a company just because there aren't many other options in your area.
In the last table there needs to be a line item for: # of Unicorn Companies, or # of Publicly Traded Tech Companies.
Yeah, I actually considered including that, but the answer is super obvious: the Bay Area trounces every other place.
I responded to a comment above about this, but I don't want to come off as a Seattle booster or Bay Area basher. I live in Austin and think my own analysis makes the city seem better than it is. We lived in the Bay for 7 years and both my wife and I agree that if we hadn't wanted to raise kids near our parents (a value we agreed on way before having our first), we would definitely have stayed in CA. So many cool people and interesting roles.
What is it with people and not understanding percentages?
"How Much Less Do Techies Get Paid Outside the Bay?"
"SF Bay Area 100%"
"Miami -88%"
So people in Miami are paying to work?
And even if it was meant to be relative to a baseline (which is not what it says!); i have a very hard time believing that they get only 12% the pay in Miami compared to SF.
Yeah, this was completely my bad. Any chance you'd like to proof future posts for stupid mistakes like this? :P I joke, but I'm writing 2-4k words per week, and the sheer number of simple arithmetic calculations makes it tough to catch even big mistakes.
Seriously, though, if you know of a way to proof posts (services, forums, etc), I'd be interested. What I need is an editor as a service. The blog is just a hobby, so I can't afford a real professional editor.
> Wow. Just wow. Is there really a mistake this big here?
Yup TFA is misleading and arguably plain incorrect.
If you make $200K in L.A. and $300K in SV, you need to use seriously creative math to deduce that: "How Much Less Do Techies Get Paid Outside the Bay? -50%".
Literally TFA says you're paid "minus 50% less".
Negatives (in both sentences and numbers) are a bitch, especially when there are two negatives or more.
TFA should say "How much more would you get paid by moving to The Bay?" and not use negative percentage.
(raw median)
"How much more would a L.A. dev ($200K) make by moving to The Bay ($300K)? 50% more"
The fault goes deeper; they say X percent less counted in percentage points of the compared thing and not the baseline. If you then have multiple rows, the uselessness becomes evident.
Is it some cultural or linguistical thing where it always has to be X amount more or less and never "Y% of"?
> It used to be that the best city for technologists was the Bay Area.... ...but Covid reordered the world.
The Bay Area governments and surrounding State have/has essentially unlimited budgets. They have no political opponents. The actual problem is the ideas, and I wish they would stay in California where they belong.
No problem with the ideas that cause Alaska, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas to have higher violent crime rates than CA as a whole?
1) The FBI web site recommends against using its data for ranking because these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents
4) From your own Wiki link: "Often, one obtains very different results depending on whether crime rates are measured for the city jurisdiction or the metropolitan area."
5) The BJS reports that 45% of violent crimes and 36% of property crimes go unreported to police. And I don't know that we can assume the rates of not reporting crimes are consistent across metros.
For one, 4th is looking at property crime, not "most dangerous," where SF is #37 for violent crime. Yes, SF attracts the nexus of crime around the BART stops, but that also pulls it from most of the surrounding area, which OP was talking Bay Area as a whole.
Anecdotally, I've been here 30 years and never victim of a "dangerous" crime. Fat chance you move to Mountain View to work at Google and anything happens to you.
The only place in CA someone reading a "Best City for Techies" will encounter crime is Market St. and Tenderloin in SF. The rest of it in deep Oakland, Stockton, Modesto, San Bernardino, and pockets of LA, they will never end up.
I am pretty sure most people who work for Google and live in the south bay could tell you stories of having their car windows smashed in, and I do mean most. I think it is about 100% of the googlers and ex-googlers I know have had that experience.
Also as of two years ago, the chances that your Catalytic converter was stolen unless you parked your car in your garage was getting near 50% as well.
I suppose if you limit crime to just "dangerous" maybe it comes out on top, but I would prefer to be somewhere that I don't have to worry about 50,000 of my neighbors OD'ing on the street every year.
South Bay petty crime and homelessness has unfortunately arisen but that is a real alarmist way to speak about the most mundane stretch of suburban sprawl outside of LA County.
Interestingly, this is a similar experience I have from friends from when I lived in Johannesburg. Smash and grabs and car/parts thefts were very common.
> Most of the Bay Area is safer from crime than 90% of the country
That's pretty hilarious.
In the 48 hours I was there, I had a homeless exposed his dong to me, another offered to sell me cocaine, then while I was eating at a nice Thai Restaurant, a lady in her underwear smashed the front window of the restaurant with a fire extinguisher.
Literally none of these things have ever happened to me anywhere else in the world in 39 years, except for the 48 hours I was in the Bay Area. Now please tell me about Selection Bias next.
It's the same deal in Seattle, I don't even bother reporting this stuff to the police. Elsewhere, the police would respond and it would show in statistics.
I grew up in a small Midwest city that I thought was pretty nice and safe, but is a statistically very dangerous place to live. I knew of Oakland’s rep before I moved here, and was underwhelmed with the reality of it.
I’ve never once felt as unsafe in any part of Oakland as I did at the Taco Bell on S. National in Springfield, Missouri on any given Friday night.
People have these ideas because “most dangerous city” lists usually mean most dangerous big cities, and leave implicit that more-rural areas are far safer.
If you start analyzing and carving things up other ways, it quickly becomes clear that the “small town and small city America is safer than big city America” thing that a lot of people assume is true, isn’t. Muddled at best, and bordering on simply being backwards.
This makes perfect sense when you consider that violent and property crime correlate with poverty, and small towns and cities tend to be much poorer than big cities. Add in that density effects mean that you might see more crime in a big city while in fact being safer than in a small city, and the picture starts to come together.
This has zero mention of the quality of work. If you don't want to work for MS or Amazon Seattle probably doesn't look as good.
Hardly scientific but I tend to think each city seems to have attracted different kinds of companies, and not all of us are as interested in working for some types of companies as others. Personally I'd rather avoid anything to do with social media, advertising, online shopping, etc.. Health insurance SWE jobs would also not be at the top of my list.
I do wonder if this matters less if you're a PM, as the author is, and whether the fact he's a PM changes his calculation as much. I think if I was a PM company culture and how demanding customers were might be a big factor.
PMs seem to be in short supply even compared to engineers and the pay figures he's citing might reflect that. A lot of places I've worked PM has seemed to be enough of a disaster people don't want to do it. And that's even with it seemingly being easier to move from engineer -> PM than the other way around.
Super valid criticism, but how to incorporate it in a quantitative way? I happen to agree with you about the quality of jobs and the ecosystem as a whole being far superior in the Bay. I had expected CA to soundly defeat all other cities by a wide margin, but either due to remote work or some other weirdness in the data collection, that didn't turn out to be the case.
Maybe glass door reviews? Another commenter suggested # of Unicorns?
I have this weird view/feeling that the Bay area opportunities have steadily shifted towards all the negative stuff over the past 20 years. It's obviously not the whole picture but it tarnishes the reputation.
It's like everything "bad" about tech has seemed to grow out of SV, as if it's become the place for grifty companies to find tech workers who don't care about what they're working on as long as it makes money.
You maybe could have quantified things like how far away workers typically have to live from the office, how bad traffic is in these cities, etc.. Traffic figures are often available in terms of "hours wasted annually".
It seems most of these cities are "horrible" on things like traffic though.
Judgements based on lifestyle, value for money, politics or any other similar factors are obviously going to be very subjective, but it is absurd to make the argument that anywhere outside of the Bay Area is better for starting or growing your tech career. Silicon Valley is still where all the top tech companies of every size and scale are hiring, it's where all the top talent is concentrated, it's where the majority of startups are popping up, it's where all the VCs are, it's where most of the tech networking happens. There is a reason OpenAI and Anthropic are only hiring in-office in San Francisco.
I happen to agree: I like Austin's weather better than Seattle, but everyone I talk to disagrees with me. Don't get me wrong, I have no love of the 40+ consecutive days of 100+ heat, but overall, I'd take it over the darkness and cold of the Seattle area.
I didn't include crime rates just because unless they are super high, they don't really factor too much into the financial calculus of living in either place.
I like this article but there are a few things worth mentioning:
Total job postings can be wildly inaccurate. I know for example, Google will post a job opening, but you have no idea how many teams are actually hiring. It's much more likely you'll see one or two job openings in LA and the Bay Area, but the latter will have five times as many teams that are actually hiring.
Second is the fact that office flexibility matters a lot. Having to be in an office in Santa Monica 5 days a week is going to drastically impact your lifestyle compared to say, 2 days a week, in which you could live in a much less expensive place.
I live in Orange County and while housing is not cheap, what you can get for 2 million bucks would likely cost 4 million in the bay area.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm curious about the job data as well. I mentioned this further up in the thread, but when I moved from the Bay to Austin back in 2020, I did some searches for software engineering, UX, and PM roles and what I found was a lot more skewed. IE, Austin had massively fewer roles (if I recall, 5%) compared to the Bay.
But, when I ran this analysis, the differences were much less pronounced. Do you know of any way to correct for this bias? Clearly searching on public job boards doesn't appear to be getting at the reality.
I am not understanding how they get -88% from $300k to $160k, thats less than a 50% drop.
Its also a bit presumptuous that seattle wins on “politics”. The author is generalizing based on their own preferences, i am sure plenty choose miamia or texas for the exact opposite reason.
I'm not sure how that error slipped in there. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll fix it. I need an editor for these in-depth analyses. I always end up making at least 1 typo somewhere.
It is a deliberate oversight, the author picked metrics and test based on the result not the other way around. Even the first test (# of jobs per location) should be adjusted to jobs per population or something else since most people value diversity in their social circles.
I would argue the best city for tech has never been the bay area. Its the best place to make a lot of money in tech, but by far the best engineers I have met, and the ones who have the happiest most well adjusted lifes do not, and never have lived in the bay area. Seattle is somewhat similar, for new transplants, but there is a historical core that had a great quality of life previously.
If you are starting a company today and want the top decile of talent, you will mostly find them looking for remote roles. You will find some great workers who live in the big cities, and still want the in office experience, but by far the best people are living remotely.
I live in Seattle and the article shows a pretty arbitrary list of criteria, half of which have nothing to do with tech. Outdoor recreation is great but what about decent bars, dating scene, food, startups, tech meetups, university public events in tech? How easy is it to find a roommate, do you need a car and so on. Some of the criteria would also make more sense on a per capita basis.
> But Covid reordered the world. Combined with friendly inquiries, I wanted to re-examine what the best city for techies is in the brave new world of more remote and hybrid work.
For example, the chart with the top tax rates. Yes it's technically true that the top rate in California is 13.3% for incomes over $1M. But then they used that tax rate against the "tax adjusted income" but the income was only $300K.
They also have subjective measures that unsurprisingly put the Bay Area lower on the list.
I'm not saying the Bay Area is the best, but I'm saying this analysis is flawed and biased.