Oracle Moving HQ to Austin

Re:Oracle Moving HQ to Austin by PaulDavisThe1st on Friday December 11, 2020 @05:56PM (#25392700)

I remember in the mid-90s, living in Seattle just as one wave of "californication" was drawing to a close and just before the tech boom would start an even crazier rise in housing costs there .... listening to some local talk radio show. A caller was complaining about Californians coming to WA/Seattle and doing just what you describe. The radio host said "well, it takes two to tango, those prices going up reflect the actions of both buyers and sellers, not just buyers".

The caller was indignant: "It would be un-American not to try to get the highest possible price for your property"

The defense rests.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Oracle Moving HQ to Austin by jeffbee on Friday December 11, 2020 @07:48PM (#25393909)

Doesn't seem like mid-90s property appreciation in Seattle could have been pinned on Californians anyway. Wouldn't it have been more related to Microsoft, a gigantic and extremely successful company with an in-house Porsche dealership among other perks?

I see a similar defective thought process right here in Berkeley, CA. Everyone here blames housing demand on peninsula companies like Facebook, Apple, and Google but it's a fact that employment right here in the city of Berkeley has been allowed to double in the last 30 years while the city built zero net dwellings. We can try to blame it on distant villains but the gentrification, to borrow a meme, is coming from inside the house.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Oracle Moving HQ to Austin by PaulDavisThe1st on Friday December 11, 2020 @08:38PM (#25394377)

Microsoft in the mid-90s didn't seem like it was having much impact on Seattle itself. If there was a staffing explosion, it just wasn't evident in town. Redmond and the rest of the 405 corridor? Yeah, maybe. But not so much Seattle itself.

By contrast, the "Californication" period (say, 87-94) and the tech boom actually took place in the city itself. Keep in mind that in the 87-94 period, Boeing and UW were still the two largest employers in Puget Sound. Companies like Microsoft were "good" for the economy, but they weren't quite the behemoths that they became as the tech boom happened (and, coincidentally, as I left :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Oracle Moving HQ to Austin by throwaway201103 on Friday December 11, 2020 @11:27PM (#25395542)

Yeah I would expect that Microsoft in the late 1980s was paying much more modest salaries for software developers. That job didn't really start paying crazy salaries until the VC money arrived with the Dot-Com wave.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Oracle Moving HQ to Austin by jeffbee on Friday December 11, 2020 @11:35PM (#25395594)

I'm curious if you are old enough to remember this stuff first-hand. Microsoft employees were importing ships full of Porsches. Not a joke. Here is a 1992 NYT article about how Microsoft HQ had at least 2200 millionaire employees.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/business/microsoft-s-unli...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Oracle Moving HQ to Austin by throwaway201103 on Friday December 11, 2020 @11:44PM (#25395638)

Not really. Was in my early 20s around then, but didn't live anywhere around there. My experience with programming/IT work at that time, was that it was very much a "normal" job. It was a good, solid white collar job, paid decently well, but nothing you'd get really rich doing. That didn't change for me until the late 1990s when I got a dot-com gig for a couple of years (of course we remember how that ended up).

Were the MS people buying ships full of Porches with equity earnings or salary?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Oracle Moving HQ to Austin by jeffbee on Friday December 11, 2020 @11:56PM (#25395695)

Equity, naturally. In those days it was options and not the grants we mostly see today. You're right about programmer salaries being about in the same league as other professional careers, but I don't see how we can overlook the fact that the stock options existed.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Oracle Moving HQ to Austin by selimthegrim on Saturday December 12, 2020 @08:14PM (#25403391)

Doesn’t Microserfs go into this?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Oracle Moving HQ to Austin by didibus on Saturday December 12, 2020 @04:10AM (#25396933)

One thing I don't understand, if dwellings weren't built while population grew, where do people live?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Oracle Moving HQ to Austin by PaulDavisThe1st on Saturday December 12, 2020 @11:06AM (#25399076)

You seem to be assuming that all habitable spaces (houses, apartments, etc) are fully occupied all the time. This isn't the case.

[ Parent | on HN ]