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Tech cheerleader and prolific tweeter Robert Scoble suggests in a recent blog that Silicon Valley, if not the entire state of California, might soon see a huge brain drain. Could he be right?
Scoble tells of recently laid-off engineers ready to move to Austin, Seattle or Boston in a heartbeat if there's a job at the other end.
Then there's the appallingly high cost of living here, the state government's dire financial straits, the dreadful schools, a recent spike in crime. Besides, says Scoble, "entrepreneurs are figuring out that they can start companies elsewhere and do just fine".
That's great if they are. But it's not as though Silicon Valley (or California, for that matter) has ever claimed an exclusive hold on American entrepreneurialism. Look at the VC unit Google announced this week; it has offices in Mountain View, naturally, but also in Cambridge, Mass (home to Harvard and MIT). That's typical.
And we've been here before. In the past 50 years successive waves of Californians, bemoaning the state of their state, have moved on to start new lives, and companies, all over the western US.
Silicon Valley's real problem is that every time people leave, it fills up again and the place is now built out. All the buildable land nearby is protected, hence the high price of homes. Plus it's a who-you-know culture, and those can only be so big before they stop being effective. Both limit its size.
So sure, people are leaving. But for now, at least, they constitute not so much a brain drain as a brain overflow. Silicon Valley remains expensive because it remains full as it remains a highly attractive place to launch a company.
Ironically, the contraction is helping the Valley. Legendary programmers who've been unavailable for years are looking for gigs, and they're being snapped up, not left out on the street.
* Electric car maker Tesla Motors has unveiled its new “cheap” electric four-door sedan. At $50,000 (£35,000), the Model S is half the price of its Roadster. It'll certainly have plenty of local takers, but first Tesla needs to find the money to build it. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is hoping Washington will come through with a loan.
* Much interest here in the unexpected departure from Facebook of its CFO, Gideon Yu. It gave no reason why Yu left, but said it was doing just fine financially, thank you. The inside word is Yu clashed with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, possibly because he wanted to increase revenues while Zuckerberg prioritised growing the user base.
