DISCLAIMER: I live on the East Coast, so these are perceptions and opinions that I don’t put forth as facts. I’m more asking a question to start a dialog than professing knowledge.
So, I just heard a report claiming that there are more IT jobs than techs to fill them in Southern California. Anyone who ever reads a tech job board and/or TechCrunch has also no doubt taken note that a vast majority of startups seem to be starting up there, and that there are just a metric asston of jobs there anyway.
This boggles my mind. This is a place with an extremely high cost of living, making labor more expensive. At the same time, aren’t there rolling power outages in CA? Does that not effect corporations or something? Do they just move their datacenters across the border to another state?
Between what I would think is an amazingly high labor cost and what I would think is an unfavorable place in terms of simple things like availability of power, I would think more places would look elsewhere for expansion or startups.
I live within spitting distance of at least 5 universities with engineering departments that I think would rate at the very least “solid”, many would rate better. I would guess that I could get to any Ivy League school in 6 hours or less, driving (3 are within an hour of my NJ home). MIT and Stevens are very good non-Ivy schools, and lots of other ones like Rutgers, NJIT, Penn State, NYU, and lots more are here, and those are just a few of the ones between NYC and Philadelphia, which are less than 2 hours apart. So…. there’s a labor pool here.
Is it tax breaks? Some aspect of the political atmosphere? Transportation? Is San Francisco such a clean, safe, friendly city that you just deal with the nonsense to live there?
What’s your take on this?