Why Austin Is Falling Out of Favor for Tech Workers
16 comments
·July 7, 2025burnt-resistor
As an anecdotal sample of 1, I moved to ATX in 2019 and moved out in 2024. Reasons include:
- Apartment rents creeped too high near downtown
- The culture dragged down due to gentrification by alcoholic, kidult, uncool office workers
- Too many unfinished megaprojects downtown ruining the charm
- Houses are way, way cheaper anywhere else, especially in the triangle
- The incidence of severe weather is less in pockets around the 100th meridian west
- MAANG curtailed permanent and hybrid WfH with RTO requiring commuting in a major metro like NYC and SV
cosmicgadget
Seems to just say that entrepreneurs are finding the Austin tech crowd to be lackluster. Though this was funny:
> We've seen one big shift away, and that was Oracle. So they moved from California to Texas during post-pandemic era, and now they've moved to Nashville.
burnt-resistor
I was born in San Jose and lived on the SF peninsula for most of my life. The tech scene of ATX compared to SF-SV isn't comparable at all.
acquiesce
> Austin tech crowd to be lackluster
Is this codeword for the tech crowd expects salaries in US dollars?
ikr678
Can't imagine why skilled migrant workers arent flocking to red states.
unethical_ban
That stuck out to me, as well. How crappy must it be for your company to unexpectedly lift and shift people across the country twice in half a decade? Or are they firing people and hiring new ones?
dralley
It's Oracle, I can only assume that hostility to their employees is part of the package, since it seems to be their default state towards everyone else :P
acquiesce
Cue the presentation YouTube vid.
ternaryoperator
They didn't lift and shift many employees. These are primarily legal changes. Safra Catz is still in California (as are most senior execs), Ellison in Hawaii.
10hr
Aren't these just openings of new campuses i.e. expansion and they label 1 their "HQ"
burnt-resistor
MAANGs did passive-aggressive layoffs by requiring RTO and relocation to major metros.
k310
Please note that moving HQ is not moving the entire company. BofA HQ moved from SF to Charlotte. Musk and Ellison are shopping HQ tax breaks, cheaper labor, and apparently, access to a health care labor and business boomtown (Nashville) after buying Cerner. [0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/23/oracle-is-moving-its-world-h...
0xbadcafebee
"Called back to the office" is such a weird turn of phrase, like you're cattle being called back to your pen. You people do realize that you have the power, right? They need you so they can make their crappy products. All you have to do is boycott working for tech companies until they let you work remote. We all saw remote work in the pandemic, how productive people became. We all know that return to office "for productivity" is a lie. They just want an excuse to pay for big offices, and an excuse for laying us off at a moment's notice. They will continue mistreating us until we stand up for our rights, together.
manjose2018
There are enough people out of work right now (with bills to pay like mortgages, childcare, tuition, etc) that most potential candidates will be more than happy to work in the office for a paycheck.
fzeroracer
I think the answer is far simpler. Texas is an increasingly hostile state to live in, and tech workers are taking an opportunity to live in states that aren't. That's what I did; the moment I got a full remote job I left Austin in 2022 and didn't look back, nor do I even think about applying towards companies in that area.
It's not just the state politics that make it hostile, but the shifting climate and refusal of Texas to prepare for these events as well. I was essentially snowed into my apartment during the freeze in 2021 and had about a solid week before I could go anywhere or places started opening up again. I was among the lucky few that still had power too, many of my coworkers lost power for up to a week. Before that point I was already iffy on sticking around, but that event accelerated things massively.
This is a little misleading. The data they quote is based on their previous article[1], which just uses this analysis[2] provided by a VC company. Funnily enough the same VC company put a seperate clickbaitish article just a year before that one, claiming the exact opposite findings (about startups ditching SV).
I would guess a lot of these annual trends are just random fluctuations in their dataset, though to be honest I wonder how they're even trying to estimate this kind of information.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/austins-reign-as-a-tech-hub-mig...
[2] https://www.signalfire.com/blog/signalfire-state-of-talent-r...
[3] https://www.signalfire.com/blog/state-of-talent-tech-trends