Murph, California does not seem to be handling the COVID very well these days. And the tech companies are leaving too. You moving to Texas?
It's a shit show. What a disappointment - we spent months in the lowest 1/3 of states per capita and then went straight to the top of the chart. Complacency, fatigue, who knows. People will earn some very interesting PhD's in sociology and statistics poring over the data - how did California stay low for COVID during the wildfires when the whole state was evacuating into shelters, but then when the fires died down, the cases shot up?
A lot of the Bay Area Counties would still be in the middle of the pack if they were states, but all have tripled or quadrupled. We are at the top because the four biggest counties in the state, down in Southern California, are all having monster outbreaks.
No reason for me to leave, I got here early enough that my housing situation isn't a disaster. But there are a lot of people making 150k/year who look at the bottom line of paying 60k a year in rent and thinking that at 150k, I should be rolling in so much dough I don't even have to think about "a budget" but instead I have to eat Top Ramen if I ever want to own a home, and the weather and the scenery and the entertainment options aren't worth it. COVID has added to this in that companies have now had to build the capability for distributed work and if a few companies embrace it, then any company that doesn't will lose too many people. So there is impetus for trying to put in another hub somewhere so you don't end up with every employee living someplace completely random, instead giving them a few choices where you can try to hold on to the ability to gather groups.
But if 10% of "tech" were actually to leave, housing prices would come back down pretty fast and people wouldn't have to make that choice anymore, and Silicon Valley would still be the epicenter of everything. I mean, if all these companies actually left (for example Oracle is moving their HQ but has 10,000 plus employees in their buildings in Redwood Shores that aren't gonna want to all move) - the Bay Area tech presence would still be 3-4x what it was 20 years ago.
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