Gotcha title. Read the article. SF is definitely not coming back anytime soon. Most commercial real-estate is vacant, crime is horrible (they need batman) and the leftists policies are not going to change anytime soon. I was there recently and witnessed an armed robbery. There are lots of cars with windows knocked out from thieves. I wanted to go the OpenAI conference, but after my last experience decided to skip it.
I've been hearing the same from friends still there, but there's tons of new people still moving to SF from other states and countries. Seems despite the city problems, there's always a supply of people willing to try and make it there. Then they leave when they've made it, burned out, or start thinking of a family.
I'm just telling how it is. Most people go to SF for a job or a dream. Nobody can work hard forever and dreams either come true or burst. When they're done working hard they usually move somewhere easier. It's a cycle with people coming and going. And I don't have to post negative about SF... everyone knows it's a beautiful and gringy city at the same time depending if you're looking up or down the hill.
I think you gave a biased opinion (as we all do, that's fine). There are plenty of people over 40 in SF [1] and plenty of people who choose to live their full lives here. You may not be friends with them, but they exist.
What I also notice is that most anti-SF people need you to agree SF is bad. They are unwilling to accept that anyone could like it (despite it being one of the most in-demand places to live in America, which they hand wave away as being a jobs thing).
It's truly bizarre, because I comp it to a city like Paris which has many of the same cleanliness & "law and order" problems, but it has nowhere near the amount of people who demand you say it's bad.
Yeah low-key the worst part about SF is that it's in America (it gets all the problems of being the most liberal city in a conservative country), but also if it were in Europe it would be one of the worst cities there.
Honestly, that's why it's so polarizing - if you like the walkable layout/high density thing, you probably don't care about the better personal economic opportunities vs. Europe and if you're looking to get rich, you want a compound on the beach anyway.
Lived there for a while in 2014. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be, so people who live there are easily able to ignore it. Then when they leave, they can’t stop talking about how bad it was because it really is bad. Humans can endure/ignore a lot without saying something or attempting to fix it.
Every time I visit the supposedly 'great and affordable' cities I find myself in a car way more often, I find myself visiting homogenous chains way more often, and I generally find myself way more isolated in bubbles of my own economic class/social circle (largely due to driving everywhere).
To each their own (though, as implied, most anti-SF people think SF is an objective bad and aren't afraid to tell you that).
>Humans can endure/ignore a lot without saying something or attempting to fix it.
Very true... that's why I said SF is one of the few US cities I could live in [0] while it's still nowhere near as livable as EU or Japan. For me personally, livability comes down to the quality of public transit.
i skimmed the interview and didn't get the impression San Francisco was coming back and "tech hub again" doesn't appear in the interview that i could find.
There's a little bit of editorializing in the title, but Garry's basic contention is that YC is firing on all cylinders, and it's headquartered in SF:
> Jamali: It’s kind of interesting — so that narrative is there, but are you saying at the same time that there is this comeback happening, that maybe a lot of people outside of San Francisco haven’t appreciated? A comeback that’s being driven by the tech industry?
> Tan: Yeah, at the end of the day, what we want is prosperity. And the coolest thing in the world is that at Y Combinator, we get to see two or three people come together from any background, from any country in the world, and they have a fair shot here. They get half a million dollars, and they can go and try to create something that touches a billion people. And that’s really what we try to do every day. And if they succeed, they’ll have thousands of employees, and these are good, high-paying jobs in tech. And that will actually create so much prosperity for the whole community, that that’s actually why San Francisco is so awesome.
Not so much in the interview, but a common claim is that many of the most important AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are located in the city, so there's a bit of an AI boom going on.
For general context though, Garry's part of the crowd that's committed to staying in San Francisco and getting involved in local politics to make the city better. Whether or not you agree, he's definitely going to have an intentional pro-SF bias in general, which he'd acknowledge.
You can get way more than half a million dollars per year making something that touches half a million people by working at a FAANG. In the end you're likely to be much wealthier by working there than at a failing startup. It's pretty exploitive of YC to pimp the startup so hard; the only one making money consistently with that lottery ticket approach is them.
>but a common claim is that many of the most important AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are located in the city, so there's a bit of an AI boom going on.
I think the stronger claim as to why SF is the hub is: where else is the center if not there?
Seattle/NY/Boston/Austin/LA/Miami has some activity (probably in roughly that order), but hard to really call them the center of anything.
RTO is pushed for a simple reason: WFH means working like a contractor, so if you find another offer just a bit better you get it, since there is no need to relocate, change office culture habits etc. Beside that remote workers would like owning a home, not leaving in small places consuming services, witch is against the "agenda 2030, you'll own nothing".
However RTO will fall, because people never want to change, but they was forced to change on time and they discover that's a good change, you will not pull them back even offering shorter workweeks and side benefits. You'll just push back low skilled labor and with them no company can go much further.
I doubt Garry, literally someone with the power to make SF a tech hub (as he did by doubling down on YC in person in SF) who knows Sam Altman (the guy who runs arguably the most important private technology company in the world, which is headquartered and growing in SF) would use that sort of language about SF anyway.
> Lily Jamali: So you call this “Cerebral Valley,” is that right?
> ...
> Jamali: Got it. What does that mean, that term?
>
> Tan: Well, I think it’s a play on really the brain,...
Once you have a family, living in SF is a very poor proposition, unless you are very well compensated. And if you are very well compensated, the taxes are really bad especially compared to services and quality of life.
I think SF makes the most sense for childless males between 22 and 30. After that I would find a new home base.
Many new families move to surrounding cities Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Mateo, Alameda, Mill Valley, etc. Way less crime and still within reach of SF.
Some, like me, bet on WFH and become expats abroad to enjoy a balanced life.
I think what he means really is that the Bay Area is reasserting its dominance across finance, education, and talent.
It really is the best place to be for startups given the ecosystem and it still really isn't even close.
San Francisco, as a small part of the Bay Area, is a bigger question given the problems it has with poor governance, but the Bay Area which dominates almost the whole tech stack is not.
I'm sure he's hoping for this, but the current politicians in control at various levels are themselves eliminating the possibility of silicon valley's return.
Even at the federal level, actions they are taking mean silicon valley will be trending the other direction.
Much of their problems are state level to be clear, but they are so far gone there's no chance of any short term recovery.
Forced relocation is a component of companies rolling back remote work.
Not to mention new COVID-19 variants ripping through the workers and their families. I have too many friends who are now permanently disabled by their last round with the virus.
For the sake of clarity can I ask for more details on the COVID19 effects around you?
In my circles there is one person who lost her sense of smell, and another friend lost three elderly extended relatives but otherwise I haven't personally seen much more. Is this a more recent thing?
I might be missing something but there are tons of 2br+ rentals around $4k a month. That seems perfectly affordable on a USD200k/yr salary. Maybe it's a matter of adjusting one's expectations?!
While I agree that it’s hyperbole, a family really does face vastly larger costs of living in SF.
Rent impacts more than just your personal rent. People only work on SF if they’re paid enough to make rent/cost of living so labor prices rise. Shops also need to cover rent and labor costs which then spirals.
It’s really not though, you just can’t have a 4000sq foot house here, you get a 1000sq ft apartment or you commute in. 200k income won’t buy you a nice house in Austin or Miami without a commute either.
Maybe that is what they want? People coming to Cali to burn their passion and youth, fueling the economy. Then they get a bit of savings if they rent and live like crap for a few years and jump companies to somewhere more affordable.
Because honestly, unless you hit it big somehow or already have a house in SF before, I don't see how an average salaried worker can afford a family home there. Settle down and making a new family is just near impossible.
Yeah, all the tech leaders freaking out about low birth rates (especially among the highly skilled) are supporting an economy that is structurally hostile to family formation among those people.
> Not to mention new COVID-19 variants ripping through the workers and their families.
You're not going to believe me, but you need to take an honest look at severity of current variants, availability of vaccines and treatments, and weigh that against how you want to live your life. You might reach the same conclusion, but it sounds like you're still fighting the last war.
Not GP, but an ongoing concern I have with covid is that the "severity of current variants" is something that you can really only know after the fact and mild cases can still cause long term effects. I also think that, even if there is a really dangerous strain that evolves, there's no way that in-office companies will go back to WFH, so it might make sense to plan for that possibility.
It could also be the case that they're fine with the risk of covid when it comes to actually living life (travel, hanging out with friends and family), but doesn't want to take that risk just to make zoom calls in an office instead of at home.
Offshoot question. Would it be affordable to get an acre and a little cabin in the Santa Cruz mountains? What kind of commute would that be to the tech hub?
It looks close on a map and seems like a lot of open land.
Only the preserve, but the Santa Cruz mountains have tons of people living there. The downside of Santa Cruz mountains is there's only one road in/out and it's often blocked from traffic, car crash, fallen trees, rain. Not to mention yearly wildfires.
~1 hour commute each way. Doesn't sound like much until you start to add it up and factor in things like wear and tear and gas. Driving 17 highway is a lot of fun and beautiful, but it is like playing Russian roulette with accidents.
In a place like SF it’s really quite fun to commute to the office. I can easily see cities not having much WFH. Elsewhere, the commute just wrecks your soul.
Yes, but with traffic (or reliance on public transit, and the Bay Area's n different transit orgs), a 10 mile commute could easily be more than an hour each way.
I'm hoping tech plateaus and the bubbles burst. Maybe Silicon Valley would become livable again with normal cities and regular housing, not this gilded dystopia we have with the ultra rich tech class dabbling in society, popping into cities to make a quick buck before moving on and leaving behind a wasteland of empty giant towers. Meanwhile everyone else, like the families who've been there for decades, suffers from the hyperinflation we cause.
I remember when San Francisco was so awesome as a kid. Now every time I visit it feels more and more like Blade Runner :/ Seattle is suffering the same fate. Meanwhile someplace like Chicago is vibrant with life and culture, with affordable housing everywhere. I can't help but think it's the tech that's the problem, not the other way around.
Honestly these things come and go, as they do in all big cities. Adapting to change, especially for large groups of people, is alway rough and tumble. I’m sure they’ll get it figured out eventually. Just in time for it to change again…
Also, most residents as Chicago disagree with your assessment of their housing affordability.
Sure, these things come and go, but isn't that partially because of the types of industries and workers that settle there in a given period? I'm sure it was quite the scene during the gold rush or tenements eras too. In the 90s it seemed really nice though. Rose tinted glasses and all that.
I don't think Chicago is magically more affordable or anything, just significantly more so than West Coast tech hubs, while still being very livable (transportation, food, culture, art, diversity, etc.) It does lack nature compared to the West Coast, but there are some really well maintained parks and awesome museums.
Point is, cities are in part defined by who lives and works there. Tech workers as a class don't really seem to contribute as much "liveliness" to a city, IMO. We make our money, hoard it or spend it on luxury cars and housing, then mostly keep to ourselves. Not very community or civic minded. Not EVERY worker, obviously, but it's a stereotype I've seen true more often than not in my limited personal experiences.
Crime in first-tier coastal cities isn't the problem. Serious crime in them is at much lower rates than in peer cities in the South and the Midwest.
The mixture of hyperwealth and soul-crushing shit-on-the-street-people-huddled-around-burning-garbage-cans poverty right out there on display for everyone, and the lower-working and middle class getting uncomfortably squeezed in the middle is what makes SF look like a sad parody of Blade Runner.
I remember the same. I visited Alcatraz as a kid in the early '90's, and then later returned in 2010 for my tech career. 2010 was pretty great honestly, but by 2014 I realized I was just one of the hollowed out tech workers too busy and drained from work to contribute anything of value to the city.
That's one of the big issues with tech: it isn't really tied to place. It has global reach via cyberspace, with entire decades of work existing purely as bits and bytes in the cloud. Only a software engineer would even have the slightest clue of the vastness of various compute systems composed of millions upon millions of lines of code. People work day and night on this stuff, and the general public only sees the tip of the iceberg.
I think this makes for a challenging recipe to balance in a local economy
San Francisco and Seattle might have more affordable housing everywhere like Chicago if there were land adjacent to the city everywhere, like in Chicago. Instead, the cities are on penisulas. The only way those cities are going to be affordable is to look like Hong Kong (and even that might not do it, as in the case of Hong Kong). Needless to say, no one has accepted this.
You can't blame tech. There was tech for years, and housing filled up all the orchards and farm land south of San Francisco. Then, at some point, there stopped being farms to build on. The same thing will happen to Chicago if growth continues; people are only willing to commute so far.
Those are still part of the greater San Francisco/Seattle metro areas though. As in like no one variable might explain everything, but compounding tech money with the limits of geography might just be a double whammy. And the BART isn't very good and Caltrain has limited coverage, so proximity still matters a lot. And Seattle has atrocious transit. In Chicago, living in the suburbs isn't so bad because the trains are so good (relatively).
And then add rampant NIMBYism on top of that, especially from people who bought in early, and it's a disaster for subsequent generations of would-be residents.
> San Francisco and Seattle might have more affordable housing everywhere like Chicago if there were land adjacent to the city everywhere, like in Chicago.
Sure, there can be lots of factors. But the original comment was about adjacent land -- which is present in the East Bay, South Bay, Eastside etc.
If your statement is now "these places might have more affordable housing if they had different geographies, demographics, regional economies, public policy, infrastructure investments and history", then I agree with the statement, it says almost nothing.
> The Transport Ministry released an expansion plan for Haneda in 1983 under which it would be expanded onto new landfill in Tokyo Bay with the aim of increasing capacity, reducing noise and making use of the large amount of garbage generated by Tokyo. In July 1988, a new 3,000-metre (9,800 ft) runway opened on the landfill. In September 1993, the old airport terminal was replaced by a new West Passenger Terminal, nicknamed "Big Bird", which was built farther out on the landfill. New C (parallel) and B (cross) runways were completed in March 1997 and March 2000 respectively.[12]
> ....The fourth runway (05/23), which is called D Runway,[33] was also completed in 2010, having been constructed via land reclamation to the south of the existing airfield.
Environmentalists would go nuts. And I don't blame them, considering the drawn up plan to turn the bay into a river from long ago. Once you fuck an environment, it's very time consuming and expensive to unfuck it.
IIRC there's also a strict 1-for-1 policy: for every foot of land you take from the bay, you have to reclaim a foot of land for the bay elsewhere. Despite this, people will still fight it.
I was thinking something literally floating, as opposed to an infilled island. Like a carrier or cargo ship sized apartment complex. Multi family houseboat :)
Your goals are easy to achieve (independent of the state of tech) - they simply require us to make it fast, easy, and legal to build housing if you want to :)
The only people still flogging "tech hub" cities are real estate companies stuck with trillions of dollars of unsaleable office space, teetering on the brink of total financial ruin after their calculated disaster-spending during COVID backfired spectacularly.
Folks like Richard Ellis and WeWork have every incentive to try and get someone, anyone, in tech to evangelize or at least attempt an acknowledgement of their slum-lord ant piles of dirt that have bled startups and established players alike for decades now.
WFH is here. its not going anywhere. the KPI's are real and established. its is a perk that snipes hot talent from places like Salesforce and Alphabet. It is, decidedly, to the encumbrance and disadvantage of commercial real estate and the octogenarian city councils that have gilded their pockets with daily commuters.
I hope you're correct, but empirically this appears to be wishful thinking, at least among larger organizations. How many tech big-cos have implemented a mandatory return to office policy in some capacity? Some big ones off the top of my head: Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Snap. It's my observation that smaller companies tend to follow larger companies culturally, especially as they scale.
I would love to see how many other engineers want to live in non tier one metros. I’d be even more curious about a demographic breakdown. As a brown person, being in a non tier one has been uncomfortable.
> For example, the vast majority of employed people in computer and mathematical occupations report having remote-work options, and 77 percent report being willing to work fully remotely.
> Another of the survey’s revelations: when people have the chance to work flexibly, 87 percent of them take it. This dynamic is widespread across demographics, occupations, and geographies. The flexible working world was born of a frenzied reaction to a sudden crisis but has remained as a desirable job feature for millions. This represents a tectonic shift in where, when, and how Americans want to work and are working.
I can definitely understand your position with regards to wanting (rightfully demanding, even) to be treated respectably and with humanity and deceny where you live and work, but arguing SF is more accepting than all non top tier cities because of the political climate is a reach. There are plenty of non top tier cities tolerant of others.
That survey is not addressing the specific question sargun raised.
I'm happily 100% remote, working from the comfort of my SF home for a company based in NYC. I enjoy that being remote gives me control over my physical working environment (I don't have to constantly wear headphones in an open plan office, etc), and removes a commute from my daily schedule. I _also_ appreciate that SF is a dense city, where I can easily live without a car, use a relatively decent public transit system, where my dietary preferences are generally easily met, and where my race and sexual orientation are thoroughly unremarkable.
Fair, that data is hard to come by. We'll just need to see how fast SF degrows/outflows to know the scope of demand by the cohort sargun mentions unless someone wants to collect the data, run a poll, etc and see how many folks of that cohort will vote with their dollars to be in SF physically.
Is the startup ecosystem going to be able to pay enough to drag folks there in the current high benchmark rates for longer (perhaps forever?)? To be determined. YC has deep pockets [1], but you don't fight the Fed [2] [3].
That's a reasonable rebuttal. I suppose the crux of the argument is, "Can a startup become a billion dollar company fully remote?" Cleary, the answer to that is yes (Zapier, Hashicorp, Gitlab [two out of three which have IPOd, and all three are collectively worth >$10B]). So what's the rebuttal to that? So what? Office would be better? If so, bring the data and show that. Otherwise, it's an argument from emotion, PR, controlling the narrative, whatever, and not data driven.
Isn’t the more important question which successful startup only hires in-person in SF? I would guess most startups these days have distributed setups quite early.
Some of us actually like working in person. I'm much more productive in the office, and I think many other people are too.
I can buy the real estate argument to some degree, but it just isn't as simple as a giant conspiracy to get everyone back in a box so they can monitor us.
WFH jobs are now only a tiny percentage of job listings. Remote work seems to be going away for the most part, unless you're in the upper echelon of devs at FAANG
