You might be surprised if you don't require living in a highly walkable downtown core. In many places, such as Eastern Massachusetts, the jobs are pretty distributed around the area; it's only fairly recently that tech jobs have started to be located in the city at all. And you get an hour outside of Boston and there's quite a bit of housing in the $300-$400K range in many towns. That's not Midwest cheap but it's not $1.5M for a teardown either.
Of course, Cambridge and many areas of Boston proper are quite expensive (as are some of the tonier suburbs like Concord).
Silicon Valley is a bit unusual in that you can't really escape from high prices, in spite of being suburban sprawl, because of the geographical constraints.
I would like to see the bosses of these techies consider basing their headquarters and satellite offices not smack-dab in the middle of the hottest tech towns but rather in cities where there is lots of housing and room for commercial development, which are often former industrial areas.
In New England, it boggles the mind that startups and giants like GE throw millions into building offices in Kendall and Seaport when they could build elsewhere in the region for much cheaper (Worcester, southern New Hampshire, Rhode Island/Fall River/New Bedford) and allow many of their employers to get reasonably priced homes. Many are served by commuter rail or bus systems, have nearby universities, and are within reasonable driving distance of Boston/Cambridge.
And then there's telecommuting. Automattic, Zapier and a few others have embraced it but they are the exception.
And that's even assuming the jobs are actually in the city. While tech jobs in urban cores have increased in recent years, in a lot of places the majority are still out in the exurbs and suburbs--including in the case of the Bay Area. (The difference being that in regions like Massachusetts, housing prices are a lot more reasonable in many towns outside of the urban core.)
Boston/Cambridge. #2 tech hub (behind the Bay Area), and you don't need or want a car in the city. Unlike in Silicon Valley, where you basically need a car.
Neither is exactly inexpensive, though. The problem with living in a tech hub is that tech people tend to make lots of money and bid the price of everything up accordingly.
Proximity to a major city still has advantages like access to cultural events, good healthcare, etc. even if you don't need to go into the city for work. And, indeed, historically tech companies were in the suburbs rather than the city itself. Boston basically didn't have any major tech employers within the city limits for a period even though there were many in the suburbs. So even people who may not want to actually live in a major city might still want to be within an hour or two of one.
I'd argue it sort of has played out. A handful of companies are willing to pay almost anything for the people they want, especially if they're located in SV. Pretty much everyone else has shrugged their shoulders and moved on. And it works because 1.) Hiring is a very inexact process and 2.) Not everyone want to work for one of the big tech companies for various reasons.
Most US tech jobs are not in cities. They're in an industrial park somewhere. When I go into the office I'm probably about as typical as it gets. 25 top 30 minute car commute from an exurb to an office in another exurb/suburb closer to the city, but still pretty far out. No public transit options.
It's a very recent phenomenon that Boston/Cambridge have a lot of tech jobs in the city proper. As recently as 20 years or so ago, the remaining companies were still moving out.
A lot of tech industry jobs are also outside of big cities. (As are Google jobs in the Bay Area; the BA is just something of an outlier in that fairly conventional suburbia is still priced higher than just about anyplace else in the country.)
A lot of technology companies are in suburbs/exurbs. Silicon Valley is a suburb. Boston/Cambridge basically didn't have a single tech company of note in the city by the mid90s and that mostly just changed when pharma/biotech moved in, the Seaport developed, and west coast tech companies opened up mostly Kendall Square satellites.
The whole era of Route 128 computer companies never had material real estate within the city limits.
That's somewhat fair although I'll point out that migration out of the urban cores in Boston/Cambridge was the norm until not that many years ago. So the dynamics weren't all that different. And there were basically no significant tech jobs left in the core urban area until about 20 years ago.
Not your OP and not answering your question directly, but the aforementioned "tech-to-housing cost" ratio isn't so straightforward for finding out where to work. For the record, your parent seems to have thrown out Houston anecdotally. AFAIK it doesn't have a tech scene much different than would be expected from a metro area of ~6M people but it's super cheap to live in as cities go.
The 'cheap' big cities (sticking to the US, those in the middle of the country: Chicago et Houston in particular) have just enough tech to show up on the hypothetical chart and are cheap enough to place well. But IMO, even as a U of Illinois alum and massive fan of Chicago, the tech density isn't such that you would be able to find particularly interesting work, especially compared to the Bay. That said, surely there enough startups that need app/web developers to pay your rent in those relatively inexpensive areas if that's your thing.
The cities that interest me are those with a high density of tech at a lower cost: Austin, Portland, Raleigh, etc. The Bay housing cost is trickling down there too; there are so many people making _so much_ in the Bay that still can't afford to stay that when they start moving to these places they can really affect the smaller markets. Austin has had a crazy housing boom in the last ~15 years, but it would take a _lot_ more people moving to Chicago to move the needle there.
You still face issues with inequality squashing culture, like in Austin, which has a strong history of art and music and is so much cheaper than the Bay but so much more expensive than the areas around it. Bigger cities can generally support the diversity of people needed to maintain a viable culture if they aren't 7x7 miles and surrounded by water on three sides like San Francisco is. In other words, you could move out of the Bay to one of these places and live happily for a few years before you find these same problems following you to your new home.
This is a bit of an exploration but I think about leaving the Bay daily as my wife and I get more serious about starting a family. We talk about this often, and to each family, it's the most important thing in their lives. SV is really in for a wake-up call as it sheds talent that can't afford to stay.
Tech companies in Southern New Hampshire pull partially from the same talent pool as Boston. A lot of people commute to Boston every day and the other way. Those people sacrifice almost two hours a day which isn't great from a work-life balance standpoint.
If you do get a job in New Hampshire itself, the high tech companies that have to hustle to make enough money to keep up with Boston salaries or risk losing people to the commute.
I live in New Hampshire and I love it but I can't say my work life balance is any better than when I lived in Boston. But my quality of life is quite a bit better. I have a house here, I could never have that in Boston.
Why would I, as an engineer, choose Silicon Valley over Boston? It's a petty reason, perhaps, but tech workers on the west coast enjoy prestige.
In Boston, you rub shoulders with a large population of well-heeled management consultants, bankers, and corporate lawyers whose annual bonus might be several multiples of your total compensation (this exists everywhere, of course, but the banking and management consulting industries are more conspicuous in the northeast). There's also a huge medical community and many doctors in the area. These constitute the high-status jobs, and unfortunately tech falls way lower on the social ladder.
Most aren't actually. Pharma (and now GE) aside, it was very uncommon in Boston for a variety of historical reasons. (Companies that were in Boston/Cambridge were actually moving out over time until quite recently.) Nor was the city of San Francisco (as opposed to the South Bay) a tech employment center until the past few years when it started to change.
But certain urban centers have become popular living locations for (mostly) people right out of school. They may also be near customers, especially in finance and related industries. (Even when engineering offices were in the suburbs/exurbs, it's always been fairly common for enterprise tech companies to have downtown sales and consulting offices.)
Oh, I agree with you. For tech, Raleigh and Austin have a lot of activity. Massachusetts of course--Boston/Cambridge housing costs are expensive but suburbs/exurbs are a lot cheaper than the Valley. Colorado.
There is a stereotype on HN that 20-somethings are all moving into a city without cars. There is a slight increase in college-educated millennials living in a handful of particularly dense urban areas but the overall trend is much exaggerated.
I’m not in a position to look things up right now but around Boston, while a substantial number of people commute into the city, a lot of people work in suburban office parks especially from the less close-in suburbs. I’ve lived in an exurban small town for about 25 years and I only worked downtown for about 18 months. Heck, 15 years or so ago there was essentially no major tech company in the city proper any longer. All the computer companies were out by Routes 128 or 495.
ADDED; And my experience over a few decades is that almost no one at those companies lived in the city.
Mid-tier cities give a lot of bang for your buck -- Salt Lake, Phoenix, the midwestern midsized cities (Cleveland, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Pittsburgh), Atlanta, etc. Even Portland compared to other coastal options.
And even in some of the "very expensive" housing markets, you can still find homes that are affordable relative to income within 40 minutes of downtown areas. Chicago and Boston both come to mind.
The primary differences, as far as I can tell, are that:
1) Niche senior positions are harder to find in cheaper cities (think "deep hard tech expertise"). For example, nearly all of the major corporate research labs in CS (MSR, Google Brain, Google Research, IBM Research, Oracle Labs, ...) are in or around expensive CoL areas. On the startup side, "hard tech" startups are very often more capital-intensive so are even more attracted to geographic VC bubbles.
2) Moving up within BigCos is sometimes more difficult if you're in a satellite office.
Boston is still a fertile tech hiring environment with MIT, WPI, NEU around plus the Harvard MBAs. There’s some exciting VC backed and bootstrapped companies in town. And people are better adjusted/more well rounded than they are in SV. However the housing crisis, transportation/traffic problems and quickly growing COL are going to drive people away.
Office space would be a lot cheaper if you would just move out of the big tech hubs! Even Silicon Valley has its distant suburbs where rent is cheaper, and commute times are lower.
I'd agree with this characterization. I started my career in Boston - actually, one of the first companies I interned at did high-assurance systems for avionics, financials, and medical devices.
However, look at the size of the West Coast tech industry vs. the size of tech firms in New England or the Midwest. That's what I mean by an economic argument. I got paid 5x more at Google than I did in Boston, and I was employee #45,000 or so, not even an early employee.
There are a lot of places in the United States that are well between "middle of nowhere" and current high housing cost markets like San Francisco and NYC.
Technology wise I have heard of decent activity (including in a few of these cities some startup ventures) in places like Austin, the North Carolina research triangle, Miami, Boulder, Phoenix, Portland, Boston, etc. (Internationally, I'm sure there's some other markets people can add.) I have heard of housing costs creeping up in a few of these locations, but as far as I know, most of these still have pretty affordable housing compared to the Silicon Valley as a whole currently. Yes, the culture varies considerably between all these cities, but none of them I would describe as "middle of nowhere".
Of course, Cambridge and many areas of Boston proper are quite expensive (as are some of the tonier suburbs like Concord).
Silicon Valley is a bit unusual in that you can't really escape from high prices, in spite of being suburban sprawl, because of the geographical constraints.
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