Silicon Valley for instance is sitting on top of a giant swamp. In the 70’s it looked like the middle of nowhere. In 2018, it looks like a bunch of office buildings and strip malls. Is this attractive?

Young folks are looking for the fame that’s what it is. The google’s, facebook’s etc. Yes there’s always san francisco but these are just extensions of the headquarters just to make sure they get hold of everyone.

If the fame was in the middle of nowhere people wouldn’t hesitate a second to move to that place. If it’s not you, someone else will.

People mentioned multiple big offices being opened in various locations, none of them in SV.

I completely agree that SV isn't a very attractive place nowadays, especially not for young talent.

Sure, we just use SV as a great example of places located in the middle of nowhere with tones of potential for Tech Giants. Look at the FB campus in Menlo Park, the median employee age is 28 years old. Now look around the campus... it's a giant swamp and there's a free way. That's it... oh and it's next to East Palo Alto.

Young talented folks came en mass. It does work to open a campus in the middle of nowhere. Why Tech giants still go to large and expensive cities? It doesn't make any sense but to satisfy a few folks who for the most part share an apartment with roommates or rent a studio in downtowns making 6 figures.

The vast majority of employees who "moved" to the new Menlo Park office were old Facebook employees who worked for them in Palo Alto right before the move.

Facebook now has an NYC office too. My uneducated guess is that their candidates now have far more options than they did 10 years ago, and more people would rather not live in SV.

Have you ever visited their campus in Menlo Park? :) you’ll see young and fresh employees all over the place.. they finished their new campus next to their old buildings and are now building another campus next to the new campus. On top of that they’ve bought land around to build a Facebook village for employees. It looks like 5 college campuses in one. Offices in cities like SF are very limited in space and can hold only a few employees. This is true for google, FB, linkedin, etc. Majority of the folks are recruited on teir main campuses in SV.

No doubt many new hires are OK relocating to Menlo Park. Evidently, many are not. Facebook would not invest in an expensive offices in NYC, for instance, if everyone was just happy to relocate to its huge campus in Menlo Park.

My comment referred to the first proper Facebook campus was going to be very close to Palo Alto since that's where their first offices were. Just like has been the case for Google and a bunch of other SV employers.

I'm a young person considering job offers in the Bay Area right now - one of my major considerations is that I want to live in a city. One company is in Oakland, which makes that possible, and the other two are in SV, which makes it very difficult. It's really dissuading me from wanting to do stuff in SV.

If you want to live in a city, don't go anywhere in SF Bay would be my advice.

SF is not a normal city anymore. Oakland isn't much of a city.

I'd focus elsewhere.

I don't speak for all young folks, but at least for me I just want to be in a big city where there's a lot going on - people from all over, interesting events and new experiences. Oh and also good public transportation, most young people aren't super into owning cars. It's hard to say if people would move to the middle of nowhere for the big names, I'm sure a lot of people would but I definitely would not, and I believe many of my friends feel similarly.

It's a bit of circular logic. Big names are where big populations are. By that criteria San Francisco city has more "nowhereness" than San Jose.

New York metro area is much more nowhere than Tokyo metro if you want to go buy sheer population in a continuous urban conglomeration.

And to me, personally, NYC is just as nowhere as Boise, Idaho. Just a bunch of people living in groups doing things they find interesting, or can't leave due to financial/family/personal reasons. You can do lots of stuff in and around Boise that the same people can't do in NYC and visa versa, depending on individual preferences.

Many folks I know get bored quickly in NYC and SF. I do. I still love NYC and SF, though. I suffer from a bit of Stockholm Syndrome ;)

> NYC is just as nowhere as Boise, Idaho. Just a bunch of people living in groups doing things they find interesting, or can't leave due to financial/family/personal reasons

I am having difficulty thinking of any group of humans living anywhere that doesn't meet this definition. The same could be said for a mining town in Siberia, or an uncontacted tribe living in the Amazon, or prisoners in a prison.

> You can do lots of stuff in and around Boise that the same people can't do in NYC and [vice] versa, depending on individual preferences.

The list of things you can do in Boise that you can't do in NYC is effectively zero if you exclude "the outdoors" as a category. For people who don't prioritize the outdoors as highly as other things in life, this makes Boise effectively nowhere by comparison.

It's hard to definitively say, but I'd bet that the young people enjoy getting paid between 2x and 50x what they'd earn back home then retiring when they're 30 more than they enjoy the fame.

50x? FAANGs pay well, but you are wayyy off.

There are a lot of places in the United States that are well between "middle of nowhere" and current high housing cost markets like San Francisco and NYC.

Technology wise I have heard of decent activity (including in a few of these cities some startup ventures) in places like Austin, the North Carolina research triangle, Miami, Boulder, Phoenix, Portland, Boston, etc. (Internationally, I'm sure there's some other markets people can add.) I have heard of housing costs creeping up in a few of these locations, but as far as I know, most of these still have pretty affordable housing compared to the Silicon Valley as a whole currently. Yes, the culture varies considerably between all these cities, but none of them I would describe as "middle of nowhere".

One way to describe the difference between SF/NYC and all these other places is that the former have people from all over the place, and that makes them interesting and sort of mind expanding in a way that's hard to describe.

The latter have varying degrees of "melting pot"-ness.

San Jose is more expensive than LA and close to Boston in rent: http://d3exkutavo4sli.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017.... Also it really is the blandest area I've ever lived in in California. I don't think there's another city with a higher CoL:QoL ratio.

More expensive than LA? Where exactly in LA?

I'd suspect the parts of LA you'd like to live in - Santa Monica, for example - are far more expensive than the livable parts of San Diego.

One impression I got of San Jose was that it IS the sticks. Climate is nice, but culturally it is about as exciting as Omaha (no offense to Nebraska meant).

Yes! It's super lame here, please move away or don't move here - I'd like to bring the orchards back to my hometown.

Fins has a point though.

I live in SF but was down in SJ recently and honestly... it's just nice suburbia with the same strip malls and everything that's copy-pasted across the US?

Am I missing something there that makes it... unique?

I absolutely agree that fins has a point, and I'm serious - if it doesn't work for you, move away. There is certainly no lack of people.

I also dislike the strip malls everywhere; I was serious about the orchards part too. I wish that I could rewind to having fewer houses and strip malls and more orchards.

But for people who like suburbia but also want to work for technology companies, it works out pretty nicely. If you take the "everything that's copy pasted across the US" and splash in world class semiconductor company HQs (in San Jose and surrounding areas, like Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, etc), you get San Jose. Seems sorta unique to me, but I won't try too hard to sell it to anyone else who disagrees.

> Am I missing something there that makes it... unique?

I would almost live in San Jose for La Victoria Taqueria... almost. Their orange burritos are so damn good.

There is no better place for growing apricots.

Apricots are simply divine. For this alone, bulldozing would be justified.

It used to be quite a nice place to grow up in.

Proximity to San Francisco.

Sarcastically, not everyone enjoys stepping into human feces and dodging used needles.

Less sarcastically, how is that an advantage?

Culture - shows, restaurants, museums, etc.

don't forget the landfill that tends to stink up every year when it starts to warm up.

Actually, just did., and being 1700 miles away from SJ already feel much better.

I guess if you move to SJ from some hamlet 3 hours outside of Cheyenne, it's probably exciting. When I got there from Chicago, I couldn't believe that people actually might think it is a great place to live. Other than some career considerations, it's really a bland suburbia with nothing exciting about it.

Affordable for whom? [1] Rent is extremely high and so is buying [2]

[1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_rent/san-jose,ca_rb/ [2] https://www.zillow.com/homes/San-Jose-CA_rb/

What good is a nice compensation package if I have to put most of it towards rent, live in a crap apartment, or both?