Related: if you want to see how different urban areas stack up, this is the best list to use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar...

By that list Boston is #10 and Austin is #37 in the US, which matches how different the two cities "feel" in my experience as well.

Those numbers are from 2010. Austin has grown a tremendous amount since 2010.

If you pull in that far for Boston, then you're pulling in San Antonio into the same metropolitan area for Austin. And my point still stands.

I'm sorry, that's just not realistic. The census folks know what they're doing, and when they map out the census areas they factor in the commuting patterns and economic overlap between these areas.

Austin and San Antonio are close by, but there's a noticeable gap, and nearly no one lives in Austin and works in San Antonio or vice versa. Austin and San Antonio don't have the same housing prices, salaries, etc. Contrast that to a place like DFW where the boundaries all blur together and people cross-commute all over the region, and consequently they're lumped together in the census area.

To put this one last way, the census area described as Boston is about 60 minute driving radius around the central city. On the best of times you could make it from downtown Austin to downtown San Antonio in ~80 minutes, and in practice they each have distinct commuting sheds of 45-60 minutes that partially overlap around San Marcos.

Austin is great, and also it's half the population of Boston :)

The bigger question is why is Houston still a gigantic black hole techwise?

Because it's awash in oil money and big companies who want interchangeable cogs for their .NET machines.

It's also about institutional knowledge. It's (relatively) easy to find people in Houston who understand the value in spending $10mm to drill an oil well which has an 80%+ chance to make a single digit multiplier of your money. There's less cultural knowledge of spending that same amount of money for much smaller chance of a much, much bigger payout.

It depends on what you're asking. Apple, Google etc. know that their employees probably prefer Austin so that's why they're there. A lot of software firms servicing Energy companies are based in Austin since its so close anyways e.g. https://mineralsoft.com/.

I see these false claims about size a lot, especially spread out huge Texas cities. A lot of people claim Dallas is bigger than DC but DC has way more people, especially if you add in Baltimore and or the millions driving down 95 every day.

I was recently in San Antonio and Austin. Both seem rather small compared to DC or Boston.

DC and Baltimore should effectively be added together into one hub and that puts it well into 3rd place and ahead of Dallas for actual urban areas.