We're talking about tech workers though. I don't know about you, but my whole life as a tech worker, I've gotten up at the crack of dawn, worked all day, come home late at night exhausted and passed out sleeping until the next day. I don't even know what city I live in because I NEVER SEE IT. Culture? Nightlife? What the hell are they? It doesn't make sense that tech workers would care about these things because we never get to take advantage of them.
Not all tech workers are 12-hour-a-day workaholics.
Why are you killing yourself at work?
...no, I'm not honestly asking that, but those are the questions I'd expect to fend off.
I've literally never run into anything of the sort in my life, and I'm making a six figure salary.
But then again, HN is a startup crowd. Things might be different when you're obligated to keep flapping or die(1).
Because a tech worker can easily create $300-500+K per year in economic value for the company. Taking home 1/3 of that value seems perfectly reasonable.
Nothing in the above says anything about hours-in-seat.
What if most startups only need "good" developers to develop their mostly CRUD apps and don't need "the best" developers?
But the dream, and the reason all the coastal co's are in it, is to be the next Google or Facebook, or Twitter or Snapchat.
You could say an app to get people to come over to your house won't change the world, but people think hey maybe it will grow, or we'll just pivot, and wind up with the next Flickr or Slack, and that's certainly good enough.
Sure, but that just means that they and their competitors have already grown to the point where the market is saturated, and any further growth they are experiencing is because the market is growing or to the detriment to their competitors. They probably already had an exponential growth period, although it could have been short-lived if the market is small (and if the market is really small, may not have looked like exponential growth at all, and may have just looked like becoming profitable and leveling out).
You're right that not all niches will attract VC funded competitors, but I think the number niches that meet that criteria are actually very small, in this industry. There's always someone that thinks they can disrupt it somehow, or market it better to show people the market is actually much bigger than it appears. Keep in mind, the VC funded competitor doesn't have to succeed in it's task of taking over or changing the market to have extremely detrimental effects on companies that aren't working with the same paradigm.
Having a market large enough to support a few small companies but not large enough to warrant VC funded competitors that stays that way seems a rarity.
So, either the next Facebook or lifestyle. Of course, real world is not perfect so there's space for medium-sized businesses, but they're not an economic optimum (they're leaving money on the table either way).
There are some exceptions, but most any successful technology product needs at least a few great technical leaders, if only to say no to net-negative ideas, provide mentoring to those who need it, and to make strategic technical decisions (architecture, tech stack, technical hiring strategy, etc.).
There are highly competent people in both the lower 90% of the top 10 schools as well as in non-top tier schools
And as for competence, there's an order or two difference between a developer that can add some more CRUD to a service and one that can say no to doing the exact same thing when it is a net negative to the system and/or organization. It's one of those things that sounds simple, but it takes a lot to even know which technical battles are the top priority.
But of course that definition is useless to a VC fueled, exponentially growing trainwreck/unicorn that wants to hire hundreds or thousands of "engineers".
We're on the smaller side in SF, and I'm having a terrible time finding good ops people.
The University of Texas at Dallas, established explicitly for this reason, is probably the reason why Dallas is a tech hub.
Why is it that Austin is a tech hub (UT) but Houston is not (U of H, Rice)?
One theory: it is not the school, but the kinds of jobs people get after. Austinites went to work for Dell, and Houstonians went to work for Exxon.
[0] https://thebridgebk.com/engineering-hub-downtown-brooklyn/
What made UTD different was that it was founded by the same people who founded the largest technology company in the area, and they specifically founded it in order to do something about the low number of STEM graduates in the Dallas area. The TI founders went out of their way to engineer a STEM culture in a city that didn't have one just to grow some more talent for their company.
From Wikipedia [0]:
> Qualified personnel required by TI were not readily available in the Dallas-Fort Worth area because the region's universities did not provide enough graduates with advanced training in engineering and physical sciences. TI was forced to recruit talent from other states during its expansion and the founders observed in 1959 that "To grow industrially, the region must grow academically; it must provide the intellectual atmosphere, which will allow it to compete in the new industries dependent on highly trained and creative minds".[12] To compensate for this shortage they established the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest in 1961. The institute initially was housed in the Fondren Science Library at Southern Methodist University. Land for the center was acquired by Jonsson, McDermott, and Green in Richardson in 1962 and the first facility, the Laboratory of Earth and Planetary Science (later named the Founders Building), opened on the grounds of the present-day UTD campus in 1964. The Graduate Research Center of the Southwest was renamed the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies (SCAS) in 1967 and in 1969 the founders transferred the land and assets of SCAS to the State of Texas. On June 13, 1969 Governor Preston Smith signed the bill adding the institution to the University of Texas System and creating the University of Texas at Dallas.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_at_Dallas
While this is a laudable project and it works in some places, many rural citys are very conservative and against anything new the youth might be interested in.
So why haven't I moved? Frankly I'm scared that I can't cut it elsewhere. My job is secure and pays very well for the area (as a single person I make about 160% of the median family income). I could move and work remotely for the same amount which would result in a drastic decrease in quality of life, or try to get another job that I'm probably not qualified for. I've been trying to figure it out for the better part of a decade now.
This basically describes the prevailing attitude in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is super cheap and has all the fancy cocktail bars you will ever need.
That's somewhat different today but it's really a very recent change.
Could be issues with our sourcing, perhaps, but it seems surprisingly difficult.
(PM me if you'd like to be a counter-example)
It's a lot harder for a company to hire top tech talent if they're in Miami / Des Moines, because the Bay Area has a much higher concentration of tech workers. Convincing people to move is hard, especially so for more experienced tech workers who have a life/family somewhere. You need to be getting an insane deal for it to be worth abandoning your friends and family/forcing your partner to find a new job (and I've yet to see tech companies trying to compete on comp vs SF/SV outside of them). Can't run off middle-road new grads alone (Edit: Good point below that top grad talent wants to hit the big cities too).