[beager]

The implication from this litter of thinkpieces on HN is that proximity to a tech hub (SV/NY) is your only competitive advantage as a knowledge worker—your butt is close to their chair. This runs counter to the other prevailing wisdom about SV/NY, which is that those areas are hubs—and essential to the tech industry—because the world's top talent is drawn to it.

So which is it?

[Communitivity]

Both?

As someone who is unable to move to California due to family, I've always seen the biggest benefit I am missing to be not applying to jobs close by, but being the proximity to people I can connect with who can help me (and my ideas) grow.

It's an old cliche, but true, that if you surround yourself with people smarter/better than yourself then you will likely get better yourself; conversely, if you are the smartest person in the room on X (no one is the smartest in the room on everything), then there is no forcing function driving you to get better other than one you artificially create for yourself.

[luckylion]

"The room" has lost most of its meaning, hasn't it? You're no longer limited to working with people who live within driving distance of yourself, you can now meet super smart people from all over the world on lots of websites, talk to them, work with them, learn from them, get inspired by them.

[joelbluminator]

So you think every node.js / rails developer that happens to live in SV and work in a startup is the next Linus? Of course they're lots of ordinary developers working and living there. And yes, being born American / European is a huge advantage over 80% of the rest of humanity.

[exclusiv]

Seriously. There are a ton of wannabes up there (entrepreneurial and technical) just like there are wannabe actors in LA. A lot of incredible talent missing at those companies because people simply have zero desire to live there. I can appreciate the Bay Area but it's just not my style (weather, culture, lack of diversity in industry, etc). I'd bounce to wine country or the forests up north if I lived up there now.

[dragandj]

Additinally, Linus created Linux while still living in Finland. He only emigrated to the US after Linux was alteady successful.

[Spooky23]

Things that don't make sense tend to get adjusted during bad economic times. I've worked with alot of companies as a customer, and at end of the day, none of the stakeholders are getting bang for the buck. Companies set money on fire, employees are mostly living a middle class lifestyle at an insane level of compensation.

I live out in the provinces, and we pay 20-30% of the rate for SV talent. My lifestyle in SV would require 7x the compensation without me being any smarter or skilled than I am. NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.

[MiroF]

> NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.

We'll see. I'm betting you're wrong - NYC has nothing on SF in tech expertise and the rest of the country (especially outside of the West coast) doesn't have much on it either.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The same set of people aren't saying both things. The people who believe SV and NY have top talent are exactly the ones who think remote work is great. I'm excited about the trend; a bigger pool of talented engineers for me to work with means I'll be able to accomplish more and have to compromise less on my career goals.

The people who worry that remote work will be a disaster are the ones who never believed SV engineers were more talented in the first place.

[cvlasdkv]

> The people who worry that remote work will be a disaster are the ones who never believed SV engineers were more talented in the first place.

Or that technical talent does not really contribute to success as much as the prevailing theories believe?

[toyg]

There are multiple layers. I think SV will remain a hub from a commercial standpoint, so if you're fishing for VC money that's still where you want to be.

From a purely technical standpoint, we'll see, but tbh, as others have said, outsourcing has been happening for decades now and if anything the wave is currently retreating.

[api]

I can count three VCs in my immediate circle of contacts that are expanding up and down the West Coast at least.

The NIMBYs in SF are going to get their wish: shrinking the city and collapsing its major industry. As another poster stated: things that don't make sense get adjusted in bad economic times. Things like paying 7-10X for real estate when you're in a digital industry...

[beager]

VC money being geographically concentrated in SV seems like the kind of ingrained inefficiency that VCs themselves clamor on about disrupting excessively. Dealflow is a solvable problem for distributed futures.

[ghaff]

It can be both. Prior to the current situation, many/most companies preferred people who could/would commute to a company office. Which gives more options to people willing to work near one of those hubs and mostly work in an office.

At the same time, many people prefer to live near one of those hubs whether because they just like NYC, Boston, Austin, Bay Area, Seattle, etc. or because they believe it gives them more flexibility in changing employers. (And/or being in proximity to many like-minded individuals.)

[ralph84]

Why can't it be both? Companies locate where the talent is; the talent goes where the companies are. Your standard positive feedback loop.

[buboard]

immigration doesn't select for the most talented, it selects for the younger, the male, the willing, the otherwise unburdened etc. The intellectual bar to enter SV is not that high. The willingness to relocate, assimilate to the culture etc, is.