I read that LA was one quarter NY in terms of tech industry. Do you think LA can ever become another major hub for tech startups? Or is it too decentralized, being spread around in Irvine, Santa Monica, and downtown LA? Do you think there is any potential to not reach San Francisco Bay Area, but to at least double it’s existing industry size in five years?
For businesses like this, you usually need the best of the best. This limits the pools of workers who tend to move where the best jobs are - Silicon Valley, Seattle and other hubs of multiple tech/software corporations.
That is not to say you couldn’t find competent workers pretty much near any large city, but most people who are really good and specialize in a specific field move to where the best jobs are and the most money is found.
For example, people interested in the movie/TV business move to LA - so if you need actors, a director, set designer, costume designer, etc. - you could probably staff an entire production on a single Friday night at any local bar in West Hollywood. You would have less success trying to find those people in other large cities - although you would be able to do so, you would just not have the cream of the crop.
As an aside, I wonder what people with average skills or above average skills, or just someone trying to enter the market with unknown and untested skill ratings setting out to these types of places should expect. Some might say that there is too much competition with the best, and maybe they shouldn’t go, but simply because the creme de la creme are there does not imply that they would be competing with them, ever. If the market is big enough they could find their niche. I wonder what all your thoughts are in this thread. Do you all agree or disagree? There is evidence to support this; I think this is why aspiring actors (mediocre or excellent) move to LA. It seems to work for a lot of people. But, I wonder business and engineering related industries/occupations work the same way.
It depends. Wall Street banks, hedge funds, tech startups, and management consulting firms have extremely competetive hiring practices. Then again, not all companys are Goldman Sachs, Google or Mckinsey.
The thing is, actors move to LA (or NY) because that’s where most of the people who hire actors are. Same thing with tech or finance. If you want to get into those fields, you should move to places that hire those kinds of workers.
I used to work in the greater LA area, including the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys. There was absolutely no shortage of highly qualified technical people and startups were common. Some of them still exist and are tremendously successful.
Perhaps the best combination is computer science with audio, video, film and entertainment in general. It’s all there, and nowhere else is as strong in all these at once. Silicon Valley is a poor second and Oregon can only dream.
Silicon Valley in the SF bay area came about due to access to capital (venture capital from banks in SF) and talent (Stanford). Other cities replicated this to some effect but that was the original combo back in the '70s and '80s.
I think the tech industry has expanded to many other places and it is not a Silicon Valley thing exclusively any more. Seattle, Research Triangle in NC, etc.
Cali as a whole is having lots of troubles with startups, and estblished businesses are often wanting to leave the state as-is. I see no reason LA couldn’t become a big zone in the future, but a lot of things would have to change first.
NYC is also a big tech hub (so-called Silicon Alley in the 90s), as is Boston’s 128 loop (makes sense considering they have MIT , Harvard and a shit-ton of other colleges). The only thing with NY is that real estate is very expensive and you have to compete with Wall Street for a lot of top talent.