The Bay Area is expensive. But, if you have a tech job, the pay balances out easily. Sometimes excessively.
There is tons of interesting tech work in the Bay. Not just pay the bills and go home work. But, work that is fascinating in itself. If you can’t find fascinating work here, maybe your interest in tech is limited to the paycheck. That’s totally respectable. But, you’d probably be happier some place more family friendly, or with mountains, or with a culture less focused on work -even if your bank account won’t grow as fast.
The arts culture has fallen off recently as rents have risen and the drug/homeless epidemic has really picked up in the past two years. But, it’s SF is still a beautiful city full of wonderful things. And, a lot of (mostly dog) poop.
1. proximity to other tech companies (good for employees switching jobs) 2. proximity to venture capital (good for entrepreneurs) 3. general culture of tech work 4. general culture, food, weather?
4 seems to pale in comparison to the cost and quality of life issues I have read about (super expensive, dirty, bad transport).
2 seems plausible. But are in-person meetings so necessary and hard to set up outside the area (also, how many people there just want to be employees somewhere and don’t care about VCs?).
3 is pretty nebulous. And again I wouldn’t expect this to be a big factor for people who mostly just want to work somewhere and not build their own thing.
I’m left with 1. Is that it?
It just seems weird that company location appears optimized for founders (we should go where the action and investment money and talent is!) and not the enormous mass of people who would just be clocking into their jobs and making those companies run. I have no data on this, but it looks like those masses of lower-level employees might prefer to live somewhere more “sensible”.
It looks like such an...inefficiency.