You're absolutely right! The companies I mentioned do hire many people with similar skills.

Do you think it's possible that this might not be quite the same as being in the same market and thus being a direct commercial competitor for a company's offerings? Otherwise every company is in the Human Resources and Accounting industries. Perhaps the companies in question are not in commercial competition with one another, and only competing for a certain set of skilled technicians? Do you think the point imtringued made about downstream suppliers might be relevant?

Again, you're completely right. There genuinely is a lot of overlap in titles and skills sought! It just might perhaps be possible that this is not quite the same as all companies concerned being in the same industry. Or perhaps I am wildly wrong! Can you help me with where I might have erred?

The question of how one chooses to define an industry quite aside, the degree to which San Francisco's employment depends on "tech" is easy to overstate. Based on news and this website, you would think it was a third to a half of SF jobs. While an easy and completely understandable conclusion to draw, this would be a dramatic overstatement.

Detroit's problem was not that the companies there were direct competitors, it was that all of them were producing automobiles. When American automobile production moved elsewhere and took a large number of well-paying jobs with it, the bottom fell out of the city's economy.

What do you expect to happen to San Francisco if it loses its "tech mecca" status? Will the financial sector or the tourism sector supply enough high-paying jobs to make up the difference, or will the money drying up cascade down through the service industries?

I can see I have been unclear.

Detroit's problem was that automotive production was and is a single sector. This is not true of "tech", as shown by a random sampling of companies being in wildly different economic sectors.

I hope this is better! Thank you for the chance to improve my communications skills. Have a nice day.

> I hope this is better! Thank you for the chance to improve my communications skills. Have a nice day.

Unrelated, but I've always found it interesting how people try to avoid appearing like they're actually invested in the conversation they're having and the effect the results have on them.

"I'm not here to exchange ideas and make my understanding of the world better, no, I'm just here to improve my communication skills and I want you to know that!"

I understand the need for self-preservation, but going to this length of lying to yourself and observers to defend your ego is amusing in my opinion.

I use it to place the blame of someone refusing or failing to understand on myself. The goal is not to signal a lack of investment, but to give someone a way to admit to being wrong without actually having to admit to anything. It sometimes helps remove a person's ego as an obstacle.

It's the difference between "I failed to be understandable" and "You failed to understand". With the former, they can come back and say that since I've clarified so helpfully, they agree with me without impugning their previous position. The latter allows no such latitude.

> but to give someone a way to admit to being wrong without actually having to admit to anything

It also shows that you have no humility and can't accept that you might be wrong. That's what I'm trying to say.

> It's the difference between "I failed to be understandable" and "You failed to understand".

You can't even imagine a situation where the other party in the discussion understands your perspective but simply disagrees?

> It sometimes helps remove a person's ego as an obstacle.

Start with yourself.

As an aside, I understand your argument. I simply disagree.

Tech is not a single sector, but it is a single method of doing things. In the same sense that factories exist in more than a single sector, but it largely disappeared at the same time with offshoring.

If, hypothetically, all the issues with having development teams cheap parts of the world went away, that would impact almost all of tech. It hasn't happened yet, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility.

Honestly, that would be amazing. It would enable a golden age of technological development. I think it's just a bit more far-fetched a near-term future than a single economic sector leaving a particular area, and not really directly comparable to Detroit's story.