But moving to Texas frees up real estate in the Bay Area for more productive businesses. And given the transient nature of techies, many of those techies would have moved to California will now move to Texas, putting some relief into the housing market and maybe clearing up traffic a bit. I wouldn’t see these two moving as a negative, they’ve long had reputations as bad places to work.

The biggest hit will be on tax revenue, new "sexy" businesses dont tend to make as much money as the zombie companies that seem to print money

California makes money on cap gains taxes as well as corporate income taxes. And likely the personal income taxes won't change.

Complaining about dev teams moving to texas is like complaining about goods being manufactured in China. It's a net positive for the whole world, plus competition will improve the Vally and SF just as much as it improves individual companies and products.

Just to note here, the dev teams aren't moving to Texas, management is moving to Texas. The dev teams are more likely to be moving to India where costs are lower (especially if we are talking about Oracle and HPE).

Especially in this "everyone works from home" world that COVID's delivered us. Even after COVID's over, a lot of employers are going to be much more open to permanent work-from-home.

Net positive only if your measure for success is “able to buy more widgets for less money”

Plenty of other criteria on which it is a positive. Raising millions out of poverty. More people working on hard problems.

As to the latter criterion: consider the symbolism of Aricebo collapsing in an uncontrolled fashion on the same day a Chinese spacecraft departed te moon (and a Japanese one prepared to deliver its second sample of an extraterrestrial sample). When the Bush administration restricted stem cell research, China and Singapore picked up the slack. Etc.

In this case exporting technical work to states like Texas not only may open up opportunities for more people to do technical work but can help them as oil related revenues decline.

The world is not zero sum and to me exporting a job to China, India, Romania or Texas as are equivalently positive.

He’ll do you object to Apple building a chip development team in San Diego?

I think that them being equivalently positive is a weird way of looking at it? It ignores what the poster you're replying to is probably referring towards. If you value Romanian ideals over Texan ideals then you'd prefer Romania to get a lucrative economic position of power through trade over Texas as the Romanian government provides more utility to you due to more favorable (to you) ideals.

Though, I personally don't think these companies moving to Texas matters that much, but if there was a mass migration it could certainly shake things up in ways that some may appreciate and some dislike.

California already has plenty of that, and if it ever becomes a problem, that means there is underused capacity that will attract more people (with their income taxes) in again.

Oracle, HPE, and (not moving, but might as well add) IBM have long made their money with legal and financial shenanigans anyways, they are exactly what we should call zombie companies.

They are only moving Head Offices - not closing down campuses; most likely, it's a subset of the bean counters and admin stuff who may be asked to move. If you're cynical, you could argue they are only shipping the "HQ" signage from their Bay Area buildings to Texas.

>> Sure HP and Oracle are not "sexy" but they do employee massive numbers of tech folks.

It's a much different type of employee than you'd have at somewhere like Netflix or Google, though.