San Diego Struggles to Keep Its Young Tech Talent - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/us/california-today-techies-san-diego-bay-area.html <comment><USER3> I grew up in San Diego before spending 20 years in the Bay Area. While I totally understand why a fresh graduate would want to head north to the bay, I think as a place to CREATE a startup, San Diego has tremendous potential.

The weather is beautiful and actually beats SF. It's close to 70 year round, nice and dry, with great beaches and mountain and desert hiking. As the article notes downtown has been evolving in a really promising direction, to say nothing of classic beach spots like Del Mar, La Jolla, Pacific Beach, etc. For getaways there is LA, Mexico, skiing at Big Bear.

The computer science program at UCSD is typically ranked about 15th globally, CalTech is not terribly far north, nor is UCLA and UC Irvine and UCSB and UC Riverside, and SDSU, though it has a reputation as a party school, is no slouch.

Meanwhile the housing is still affordable compared to the Bay Area, if not cheap on a national basis. And the Valley is an hourlong Southwest flight away.

More important there is a real diversity of industry still in San Diego, with lots of biotech, defense (contracting and the actual Navy), aerospace, and health.

Thirty years ago, the Bay Area/Valley had a very San Diego feel to it. Easy to forget now, but it was a pretty laid back place where an ordinary person could buy a nice spread in the suburbs and where starting a business in your garage was a reasonable thing to attempt in a borderline casual way. You get the impression people smoked a lot of pot and spent a lot of time relaxing, whether in hot tubs or on hiking trails or wherever. It was a California lifestyle. The Bay Area feels like New York now, except with tech and better weather — just very intense. San Diego still feels like California.

I'm not saying it'll ever match the Bay Area/Valley as a tech hub; the lead in Northern California is too great. But San Diego should be at or near the top of the list of secondary hubs, in my biased opinion.

<comment><USER4> > Meanwhile the housing is still affordable compared to the Bay Area, if not > cheap on a national basis. And the Valley is an hourlong Southwest flight > away.

I see lots of >$1 million homes and >$1500/month rents for apartments, in the suburbs. Do you have any specific areas in mind? I'm thinking about moving.

<comment><USER5> In north county, places like Rancho Penasquitos (92129) have great schools and you can find decent single-family homes in the low $600's these days. It's about 15 minutes from the coast without traffic -- 25 mins from downtown. Nearby areas like Mira Mesa and Clairemont are cheaper but the public schools aren't as good.

<comment><USER6> $600,000 is affordable? How about smart? I don't mean to chide, but $600,000 for a cookie cutter tract-home is down right absurd. California is nuts.

<comment><USER7> The comparison is 2million in Palo Alto for an attached townhouse ~2200sqft. You might be able to get an 800k house in a bad neighborhood (east palo alto) that's 1100 sqft.

Friend in Buffalo is buying a house for 120k, difference is extreme.

<comment><USER8> > Friend in Buffalo is buying a house for 120k, difference is extreme.

Buffalo is an extreme example, both nationally and inside Buffalo itself. The most expensive single family homes in the city are ~$1.5MM [0]. These are mansions built in the early 1900s right on a beautiful park. Alternatively, you can buy an almost condemned house in a bad neighborhood for ~$5,000 [1]. People actually live in those places.

[0] [http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/82-Meadow-Rd-Buffalo- NY-14...](http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/82-Meadow-Rd-Buffalo-NY-14216/)

[1] [http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/647-Norfolk...](http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/647-Norfolk-Ave_Buffalo_NY_14215_M46166-25420?row=4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can see the appeal of places like SF and NYC for 20-somethings, but I'm in my mid-30s with 2 kids and in San Diego I can afford a nice single-family house in the suburbs with good public schools and (relatively) affordable daycare. When I hear about the crowding and cost of living in places like SF/Boston/NYC it makes me shudder. I love it here, but I work in La Jolla not Sorrento Valley (I'm in biotech, not IT). But I think for more-middle aged folks, the restaurant scene near work is less of a factor? I don't need excitement, I need affordable housing and schools -- and the weather and outdoor activities are worth A LOT to me.

<comment><USER9> Also, our brewery scene is _way_ better! Wait, you mean biochemists, geneticists, and molecular biologists might know something about yeast? No.....

<comment><USER10> Indeed, I haven't found a Bay Area IPA that's in the same league as Alpine.

<comment><USER11> You haven't had Cellarmaker then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I moved to San Diego to start a tech company with a partner about 18 months ago. SD was chosen because partner lived there and was established. We found it very difficult to get the attention of any VC's or potential customers. We did manage to get an interview with YC, but were declined.

Was this due to the location? Perhaps. I do know that the events we went to were lackluster, and the ecosystem was weak. You've got Evonexus (which wouldn't even talk to us), and Connect Springboard, who wanted less complex ideas. Meetups were ok but the ones we went to ended up with more hangers on ("hey I brought my class of 20 HS students to learn about startups at this meetup with 8 people!") than actual people doing stuff.

Also, to be honest I just really didn't like San Diego. My wife got hit by a car while riding to work on a scooter and was in a cast for a few months; the weather was too damn hot (and I lived only two miles from the beach); public transport is dreadful; the culture, while better than LA, is still very socal; drivers tried to kill me as I cycled everywhere; and the city is a model of horrific urban design. Even in places that COULD be great you've got organizations like the Hillcrest Business Association trying to kill a single. damn. bike lane on one of the most heavily-ridden (and dangeous) streets in San Diego - University Ave. The city spends years claiming it's doing something just to have SANDAG kill it. This is particularly egregious when you consider that Todd Gloria supports cycling - until it matters. A bike lane in the middle of nowhere doesn't take any political courage.

SD is vastly overrated. I will admit, though, that the beer and Mexican food are good. Within SD I _did_ quite like South Park. It was when I needed to leave South Park that things were bad.

<comment><USER13> If you want to be happy in SD, you have to be content with driving everywhere. Cycling sucks in 99% of the city and mass transit is terrible. If you try to live in SD like you live in SF or NYC, you will not be happy.

I'm not sure about your complaint with SD being too hot. 2 miles from the beach should be great weather. I lived in San Diego for 20 of my 35 years of life (moved away in 2011) and the weather is one of the best things about that place. Some people prefer a cooler climate though.

It sounds like you would much rather live in SF. Cooler weather, better cycling, and better public transit. For me, I prefer SD. I hated the SF weather and the public transit still wasn't really that good (BART is too limited).

I would love to move back to SD but housing costs are just too damn high and I don't want to live in the cheap parts where its hotter and boring. I'm going to be looking at rural Oregon or Washington when I hopefully move back to the US in a couple years.

<comment><USER14> Yes and no on driving - my BF and I share a car, use car2go, and walk around our neighborhood. We live in North Park. He is a video engineer for conventions and tradeshows, so he's more in the tourism industry than anything. It's actually a very lucrative career - up there with tech, if you play your cards right and have the right work ethic/talent then it can pay and provide well.

I'm in tech. I work in robotics and VR. Granted, the robotics company is in SF, but the VR company is down here. I do have to drive to work with my own car. But my BF can use car2go to get downtown when I've got the car.

We rent in NP and pay around $1000 (we got lucky) for a 1bd. We're anticipating needing a 2bd within the next two years (he's got two kids) and that should run us up to $2000 by the time we need it. That'll work though, our incomes can support that. If either of the startups I work at do well, then we'll be looking to buy in the next 5-6 years.

Housing is nowhere near as expensive here as it is in SF or NYC, though. Even better if you're DINK (dual income, no kids). We probably have to pay more for his kids from a previous marriage than we would if they were ours (child support any whatnot), but it's possible to afford housing here.

Where are you now?

<comment><USER12> To answer your question, I'm in Dublin.

Lest anyone think I'm an immigrant to CA who just couldn't hack the culture shock, I'm a Californian who grew up there- I spent thirty years there and then moved to Ireland on a lark (and working holiday visa). I liked Ireland so much I stayed for about 2.5 years, then moved to San Diego to start a company, then after that failed moved back to Dublin. It's not perfect, but the weather's cooler and the cycling a hell of a lot better than SD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm in San Diego and have visited SF many times on business and pleasure. I used to think I would want to live in the City and retire in the Bay area. Today, I'm not so sure. It's just too crazy. Driving from my friend's studio 3rd floor walk-up near AT&T Park to Mountain View convinced me that drive is crazy. I could get anywhere in San Diego in the time it took me to make that commute.

And the article didn't seem to mention this, but a lot of these SV companies are in office parks. Google, Apple, office parks with flair (and I use flair in the Office Space sense of the word). The future is falling from the sky like rain, but like rain, a lot of it is lost down the drain.

Also, Google is opening a pretty good-sized building in San Diego, just down the street from Green Flash.

Also, I'm on the Navy side of government tech transfer. I have to say, the government gives developers a pretty sweet deal on their IP rights.

Actually, y'all just go up to SF. Please. Enjoy it. I'll slum it down here. I'll visit you.

<comment><USER12> "Driving from my friend's studio 3rd floor walk-up near AT&T Park to Mountain View"

Taking a personal automobile through a metropolis might not be the best option. Caltrain also serves MV and SF.

I agree that SV, just like SD, suffers from having too many bland, incredibly sprawling office parks which are mostly acres of parking with a building sprinkled here and there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's fun to see San Diego at the top of HN.

I'm finishing a PhD at UC San Diego, and I've noticed a few things. First, there is a different dynamic for biotech talent. The biotech scene in SD is strong, and people seem drawn to that. Second, in contrast to LA at least, commuting in SD is not terribly difficult. And there is a light rail (trolley) beginning construction up to the UCSD campus from downtown. Third, this city is a draw for people (like me) who are looking for something less bustling than SF or LA, and I think it's important to try to keep young talent here by selling this idea. In biotech, we desperately need better software engineers.

<comment><USER16> What are you doing your PhD in? I'm working on a healthcare software company in San Diego. We should chat.

<comment><USER15> Bioengineering. I'll DM you on Twitter :)

[EDIT] Didn't work. Feel free to email me. Address is in my Bio.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Approaching my graduation from UCSD's CS program back in '08, I couldn't wait to move from SD to SF. Several reasons but the main ones were: 1) hard to find driven people that wanted to make an impact in their field 2) tech scene was heavily dominated by biotech and Qualcomm 3) missing intellectually curious people.

I hope it turns around soon however, since it's a beautiful place to live.

<comment><USER18> UCSD '99 CS grad here. I opted to stay in SD for my career. There has been a huge shift in the last five years -- plenty of startup activity downtown ([http://sandiegostartupweek.com/](http://sandiegostartupweek.com/)), some of the meetups are quite active (the main js meetup regularly pulls in over 100 people).

Still, it's probably not quite as active as a secondary hub like Austin, but at this rate it probably will be within the next five years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't buy it. The northern part of San Diego is pretty comparable to, say, Mountain View.

The real problem is lack of compelling opportunities. Your options are basically Qualcomm or Inuit -- neither of which have particular draw for young engineers.

<comment><USER20> This is why I left in 2009. Ten job leads in mountain view, zero in San Diego County.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Notwithstanding the authors comments about location, I didn't want the engineers who want to stay in San Diego to miss the opportunity to do so because they were not aware of the great opportunities (companies) that are here. Many of these companies are hiring, and some of the most explosive are downtown: DOWNTOWN: MindTouch Classy Take Lessons GoFormz Underground Elephant Sweetlabs ChatMeter Tap Hunter Zesty.io Skysafe

MID-Torrey/Mira Mesa/Solana: Tealium iBoss Seismic Certona Nervana (recently purchased by Intel) Zebit Ingenu StackIQ Slantrange GovX SOCI Peachtree Zingle Cordial AttackIQ PacketSled

NORTH Verve Mobile NTN Buzztime Luxtera Source Intelligence VoxOx

And this is only pure tech companies - not including the cross-over healthcare IT/analytics companies...

Good luck hunting. These companies are hiring UCSD grads.

<comment><USER21> oops - while I know I forgot many...I have to add Verimatrix (because they hired a UCSD intern this past summer!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Who cares? Where are the articles about San Antonio losing its "young oil and gas talent" to Houston? How about Philly losing its "young finance talent" to New York?

Also, I'm pretty sure biotech counts as "tech." Hey, it even has it in the name. Too bad they don't have more on demand laundry startups, since apparently that's the key to success as a city.

<comment><USER23> "on demand laundry startups"

Is that a real thing?

<comment><USER24> [https://www.getwashio.com/](https://www.getwashio.com/) [http://flycleaners.com/](http://flycleaners.com/) [https://cleanly.com/](https://cleanly.com/) [http://www.fazioonthego.com/](http://www.fazioonthego.com/) [https://www.sudzy.co/](https://www.sudzy.co/) [http://www.getclothespin.com/](http://www.getclothespin.com/) [http://getlaundri.com/](http://getlaundri.com/) [https://washtrunk.com/](https://washtrunk.com/) [http://www.nextcleaners.com/](http://www.nextcleaners.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I guess it really depends on which you value – being close to work or living somewhere cool. I am one of the few that actually reside in Sorrento Valley in the middle of Qualcomm land. People don't want to live here because the neighborhood isn't "cool" or "hip". However, I never have to put up with traffic, the Del Mar beach is about fifteen-twenty minutes away, and I can walk to Karl Strauss Brewery, Starbucks, and my co-working place. When I want a better "scene", downtown is just a twenty minute uber ride away. It actually works out pretty darn well if ya ask me, even if it's not a cool place like North Park or Little Italy.

</comment><comment><USER26> As a 23 year old software engineer that recently chose to live in SD over SF I find this article kind of funny. It didn't make sense to me to choose a place where i might make more money, but have to spend it all to live. Life can be pretty cheap in SD. I live 20 minutes/15 miles from work, a commute that would take an hour in the bay. I also pay <$700 for the master bedroom in my house. I'm also a 10 min uber to any downtown spot I want. Not much overpriced food here either, and many options if you drive 15 minutes. You may not be working at Google or Apple down here, but that might not be the worst thing.

<comment><USER27> Haha I totally recognize myself here. I'm a french 25 years old software engineer who had opportunities in SF, NYC and SD. I chose to come in SD 2 years ago and I never regretted my choice! It feels like being in paradise compared to my hometown in france.

Fantastic weather all year, good beer, great food, tons of things to do,.. Rent are pricey but I wanted an nice place to live in a not crowded/safe place (Spectrum in Kearny Mesa) so me and my roommate pay 2300$/month for a 2bd/2bath appartement with gym, pools, ...

I'm 15 minutes away from my workplace in downtown and i love to be able to drive top-down every day (I like to drive).

Sure, I don't work for Google or Apple and don't make $150k+/yr ( _just_ 85k) but I don't care! The lifestyle in SD is what I love and I don't think I'll move from here in the new few years.

Bonus point: I feel like i'm the only young french professinnal (software engineer or not) in the city so I enjoy how easy it is to pick up girl with my accent :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> As someone in Tech who has worked both in Sorrento Valley and Downtown as well as places like LaJolla, Point Loma and now remotely from home in Lakeside I can only say that as a developer I preferred my experience working downtown vs anywhere else. Keep in mind this wasn't me the Entrepreneur, this was merely me the software engineer working for someone else, I was living in Fashion Valley at the time and could take the trolley right up to the office across the street from the main train station and it was a great commute. My wife would bring the kids down for lunch and we'd meet up at the water fountain park at City Hall or at the Children's museum. If I had to work late it didn't matter because the trolley ran late into the night and would drop me off right at home. The dev team could walk outside of the office and go to pretty much any restaurant in little Italy or within a short walking distance so we were never limited to mall or fast food and team lunches were the highlight of the week. If you didn't want to go to a restaurant there were always food trucks on some days of the week and the views from the high rises made you feel like the kind of work you were doing was important. As an entrepreneur now having an office downtown is crazy expensive and an unnecessary commute but if you're trying to understand it from the perspective of the workers and the talent themselves, I would always pick a job downtown vs one in Sorrento Valley or LaJolla any day of the week but that's just me and different people have different desires and perspectives. I'm not a beach guy though but I can also see a beach office being a huge talent draw for you as well, I guess it just depends on the personalities of the folks you're trying to draw that's all.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hi from San Diego.

I did a brief contracting stint in SF, and considered relocating up there for work (the pay is indeed much better) but ultimately decided against it. Note that I grew up in the Bay Area.

In SD I pay $2300/month for a 2500 sqft house with a yard and garage, 4 blocks from the ocean. While in SF, I paid this for a single room in a shady neighborhood without a window.

After coming back here, I was struck by how _clean_ it is compared to SF.

For the young people, SD has some of the best nightlife I have experienced (and I've been everywhere throughout California). SF has better food but our culinary scene is getting much better and has improved drastically over the last decade, IMO.

We also have a growing capital scene. Its not SV, but if I were an investor I would hole up here - its nicer, cheaper, and the burn rate is lower. Plus we have some big players here: Rockstar, Sony, Psyonix (Rocket League), Qualcomm, many military contractors, and so forth. Even a bit of history here - <USER2> (which made Dungeon Master) was located in SD.

Anyhow I'll stick around here for now. :)

<comment><USER30> Totally forgot that Rockstar has a studio in SD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Little do they know that SV is just as desolate? Most of the big tech firms are 1-2 hours away from SF in suburbia.

<comment><USER32> Can you name one "big tech firm" that is 2 hour away from SF?

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Apple, depending on traffic or how you get there.

<comment><USER33> ^^^ exactly! People just don't understand how bad the traffic and transportation systems around here can be, especially the northbound evening commute hours.

My choice would have been IBM though, being as far as I can recall the most distant major tech campus from San Francisco. It's 90 minutes by car or 3 hours by train.

<comment><USER34> nobody moves to the bay area to work for IBM

<comment><USER35> Had a couple colleagues when I lived in Austin leave for SF to work for IBM...

<comment><USER33> I think it's safe to say that literally thousands of people have moved to the Bay Area for work for IBM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Slightly off topic, maybe. I live in San Diego. Anyone here from the area know of any local resources a novice developer can use? I searched through ycombinator and the one book everyone refers to is the Big Nerd Ranch one. Currently going through that.

I see that the article mentions Origin Code Academy. However, I already work full time and can't use the day time to take classes at an academy.

I have a few ideas for apps that I can personally use for my own benefit and intend on publishing the apps to see maybe others can pick it up.

<comment><USER37> I like Coursera and edX. Content is high quality and it's all still free.

Might want to check out your local community college.

Books/self-study can be great. However that style of learning doesn't work for everyone (particularly when just starting out).

<comment><USER38> Books and MOOCs are best when supplemented by studying alongside peers. I've been leading discussion groups for years as we either go through books or take courses. (An archive of some of them at [http://wiki.apache.org/lucy/LucyBookClub](http://wiki.apache.org/lucy/LucyBookClub) ).

Right now, a group of us are going through the MIT OCW Gilbert Strang Linear Algebra course ( [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear- algebr...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear-algebra- fall-2011/index.htm) ), along with Coding the Matrix from Philip Klein at Brown University ( [http://codingthematrix.com/](http://codingthematrix.com/) ).

I'm in San Diego, but most of the time I've recruited study partners from either $dayjob or the open source communities I'm active in rather than met people locally. Coursera Meetups haven't worked out so well for me. I wish I had somebody to study DSP and audio programming with. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I lived in San Diego for the last two years and this article doesn't make much sense to me. They say the problem is that Sorento valley is to far from San Diego downtown but downtown is dull and there are plenty of good places to live not far away from Sorento valley (Del Mar, La Jolla, Pacific Beach). I commuted from North Park to the UCSD campus which is close to Sorrento valley and it was no problem at all.

<comment><USER12> That's funny, I remember getting from North Park to Sorrento Valley being sheer, utter hell on earth, most of it spent crawling up 805 at a snail's pace.

Also, downtown (well, the gaslamp at least) is kinda meh but North Park, South Park, and Golden Hill are probably the best neighborhoods in the city, and about 2 miles from DT.

DT does have one advantage though in that you can take the Coaster to Sorrento Valley.

<comment><USER26> The 805 is by far the worst freeway in SD. During any commuting time, you are bound to crawl.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I was in San Diego last year. Speaking to recent graduates as well as people looking to go to university, a great many, more than I expected, mentioned wanting to move to the SF bay area for either work or study, once I mentioned living in the SFBA --admonitions about the cost of living didn't seem to have much sway.

I think young locals see SD as an outpost of (US) civilization and have a desire to move to the actual center of jobs, education, technology and a little bit of culture.

</comment><comment><USER41> I mean, you could live downtown and drive 25 minutes to Sorrento valley. Most commuters are going the opposite way. You could even go surfing in the morning before work, if you live just a bit north of Downtown.

Sorrento valley is a lonely place though, I do admit this.

<comment><USER42> As counter-intuitive as this sounds, it's actually the complete opposite. Living downtown and commuting to Sorrento Valley is a pain. My boss does it and he does 6 AM - 8PM to avoid traffic. Meanwhile, my wife goes from Del Mar to Old Town and only starts seeing traffic close to Del Mar on her way back.

<comment><USER41> Okay, I was just speculating. I lived in Penasquitos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Really? My experience is that quite a few of the students I know who graduated in CS are underemployed in San Diego and you couldn't blast them out with a nuclear bomb. Most of them would benefit from a couple of year stint somewhere else and then coming back.

And, why would they want to live in downtown San Diego? It's a terribly boring place. SD is not NYC or Chicago. A lot of young people are into the beach, and there are mixed ethnic areas that are far more interesting than downtown. Although, to be fair, the real problem is that there is _nowhere_ cheap for the artists who make an area interesting to live. Furthermore, my personal assessment is that the downtown areas in most tech cities aren't really _that_ "interesting" unless you have a remarkable amount of money to spend--which young people don't.

On top of all that, San Diego salaries _ALWAYS_ lag. I call it the Sun Tax, but you can generally go to the Bay Area for a 50+% (or more) bump. San Diego isn't _THAT_ much cheaper than the Bay Area.

</comment><comment><USER44> Add to the stack that the startup ecosystem sucks.

1) Raising an angel round - and certainly a Series A - in San Diego means getting on a plane to the Bay Area or a 2.5 hour drive to LA.

2) Potential acquirers are all up north which means not only do you have to figure out how to sell your tech people on SD while you're building, you have to then sell them on relocating when you get a term sheet.

<comment><USER45> I could always put it into perspective for you and tell you about the Albuquerque, New Mexico startup ecosystem.

As far as quality of life goes, it's still pretty good, but the startup ecosystem doesn't factor into that equation at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> When I first visited San Francisco for a work trip, I was so underwhelmed about my experience there, don't take me wrong I think it's a great city with a lot going on, but I couldn't help but feel like it was so overhyped. Several friends wouldn't stop talking about how great SF is, and in my mind I always had this silly image of self driving cars, entire streets dedicated to technology and all kinds of futuristic scenery before I visited but instead on my first visit I was greeted by some crackhead spitting on me while riding BART, lots of beggars and homeless people as I got out of the station and walked around, trash in the streets and it looked like just another city. Lots of restaurants and bars though, fantastic food selection.

I could be a bit biased on my view though, as I'm more of a suburb person.

I'd like to visit Palo Alto and San Jose to check it out at some point, I've heard it has a lot to offer too

</comment><comment><USER47> Speaking as an SD native, and a 25 year old developer, I've definitely felt the urge to move to San Francisco at times, but I could totally see SD becoming a huge hub for the tech industry if given the chance. SD would need some huge transit changes (it would be great if it actually worked), and having companies move downtown would relieve a lot of the hassle of commuting.

The north county areas of SD, where the tech jobs are, feel a lot like Silicon Valley, and I don't think that's a good thing. Leaving Mira Mesa for SV is not a win in my book. SF proper is an amazing place, much like SD, with lots of culture and stuff to do, but unlike SF, SD doesn't have the clout with the tech culture. Personally, I'm always excited when people say they're creating tech startups here, and I hope more people do.

Plus we're always on vacation here :P

EDIT: I agree that most people I meet are not interested in working for Intuit and Qualcomm.

</comment><comment><USER48> As someone from Dallas who's considering a move next year (not by choice; our state legislature has promised to pass laws next year that will make it effectively illegal for me to continue to live here), I have no interest in ever setting foot in NorCal, but SoCal is on my short list.

I find the Silicon Valley tech industry frightening and the culture associated with it degenerate. I'm not interested in the out-of-control housing costs either. SoCal, on the other hand, reminds me of home far more than most any other part of the country I've looked at. If I were to move to the LA or SD areas, I wouldn't feel too horribly out of place there.

So count me in as one young-ish person (31, but still technically a Millennial) in tech who would rather live in San Diego than Silicon Valley.

If it helps, I prefer to live in the suburbs and detest the idea of living in any kind of downtown.

<comment><USER49> > As someone from Dallas who's considering a move next year (not by choice; > our state legislature has promised to pass laws next year that will make it > effectively illegal for me to continue to live here)

What are they trying to do?

<comment><USER48> I'm transgender, and they've promised to pass bills to make it illegal for trans people to use the bathrooms according to our actual gender. If any of those pass, I won't be able to stay here without becoming a criminal. So I intend to move to a blue state if this happens. My short list is SoCal, Chicagoland, and the Twin Cities.

Here are a number of sources:

[https://www.texastribune.org/2016/04/27/bathroom-law- battle-...](https://www.texastribune.org/2016/04/27/bathroom-law-battle- begins-take-hold-texas/)

[http://www.dallasnews.com/business/columnists/mitchell- schnu...](http://www.dallasnews.com/business/columnists/mitchell- schnurman/20160517-lt.-gov.-patrick-is-wrong-bathroom-bills-are-bad-for- business..ece) (this one might have a paywall)

[http://kxan.com/2016/04/28/controversial-bathroom-bill- could...](http://kxan.com/2016/04/28/controversial-bathroom-bill-could-be- coming-to-texas/)

[http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/politics/Plano-lawmaker-drafts- bi...](http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/politics/Plano-lawmaker-drafts-bill- prohibiting-local-governments-from-issuing-transgender-bathroom- policies-393174961.html)

[https://thinkprogress.org/texas-republicans-we-really- want-t...](https://thinkprogress.org/texas-republicans-we-really-want-to- discriminate-against-transgender-people-too-updated-a026f19b45d6#.dz66r1p4c)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I got a pretty competitive offer from a San Diego startup about 3 years back. They flew me down, wined & dined & afterwards we talked a bit of technology. They even did a real-estate tour to sort of close the deal. I turned them down after a lot of thought. Based on the outcome of that startup now, I was right. But you never know...

There is a fantastic passage in William Goldman's books where he talks about why all successful screenplays have basically been written out of crummy motels in Hollywood Blvd and tiny apartments in theatre district in NYC. Most successful screenwriters like Goldman for example are millionaires and film companies can easily afford to put them up in some exotic hotel in Vail or other foreign locales etc. Why pick crummy hovels to do your best work ? The same goes for Kurosawa ( Seven Samurai etc.) who did all his best work in some tiny hotel room even though his palatial house was much better furnished. Essentially, there is something called work-culture that happens best in work- cities, and when you think about tech work, the work-cities are basically crammed rows of desks in mountain view, Palo alto, soma SF,.... You don't think of jira tickets and Tahiti in the same breath. And those were the vibes I got out of San Diego - it was so _nice_ and relaxing and I didn't see myself or my other colleagues getting any serious work done. You just felt like kicking back and watching the clouds or going surfing and lying on the beach. It's too holidayish. I would go there for a vacation, but not to actually get work done.

Like it or not, most tech work isn't particularly pleasant, and that matches the crummy efficient silicon valley vibes...rows of laptops, hardly any space, minutes away from pools of urine and filth on Market Street...I mean, it is what it is. I love Silicon Valley and I don't see work moving away from here given the nature of this work-city. Professors at school used to say the same thing about why the top math journals and papers come out of Minnesota and Chicago and Boston, as opposed to universities in more pleasant climes - because the weather in those places is so awful you have no choice but to stay cooped up in the library working on your papers :)

</comment><comment><USER51> Job mobility is also a big factor. I talked with someone who moved from the Bay Area to San Diego; people in San Diego tend to stay with their jobs for a long time. Whereas here it's not unusual to have people switching after 1-2 years.

<comment><USER52> Is that a factor or a symptom? I left in 2008 but through then it was common for people to stay in part because there weren't better options, especially since many people only have a narrow range where a new job won't make their commute substantially worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> My first job out of school was at Qualcomm.

The lunch options are actually pretty great (Mexican/Indian/Afghan/Thai/Chinese/French/Donut Touch/whatever you want) in Sorrento Valley, and it's located next to a beautiful canyon. The problem is that it's profoundly isolated from the rest of the city, and there's reasonable way to get there and back other than driving in heavy traffic. Basically, although it's in the City of San Diego, it's not remotely in anything resembling a city and it's not near anything remotely resembling a social life.

I lived in La Jolla near the beach— also beautiful, but also boring by design. Any youth and energy (other than drunks in lifted trucks) was a half-hour drive away, which also meant I couldn't drink.

I also didn't love my work at Qualcomm and couldn't find another job in a more-reasonable location.

I biked to work there, but that meant biking on the 5, which felt extremely unsustainable— the only other bike commuter I ran into was an older guy who had been rear-ended by a drunk on a similar route. There was no practical way to commute on transit— just an infrequent commuter train down an enormous mesa from the office.

</comment><comment><USER54> The article cites pay, location and happening as factors, though I also think there just isn't demand for young tech talent in SD. San Diego is where older folks/retired military go to raise families or retire proper as they land relatively cushy positions in the big sectors we do have here (Qualcomm et. al). New grad and junior positions are there yet still too few.

There is startup culture in San Diego, and maybe this is just because I was down south, but tech firms seemed to comprise only a small number of them. Of the ones I had met, they were either in "We're only interested in those with years of proven experience" (albeit they _were_ typically working in advanced areas) or "We just graduated too and can nary afford to pay anyone" phases.

On top of all that my offers were too low to comfortably move out of my family's flat (perhaps I _am_ entitled). Inadvertently, I'm now in the Bay Area.

Take this with a grain of salt. I studied abroad and my network at home was neither expansive nor tech-oriented. I'm also led to believe I couldn't obtain appropriate security clearance so military contractual work was a no-go.

</comment><comment><USER55> As a San Diego resident for the last 12 years, I have to agree it is not a good place for a tech worker. Salaries are quite low compared to other areas, companies aren't very many or particular successful, and housing costs in the good school districts are high (at least $600k for a SFR). Public transit is awful, and car traffic is quite bad as well. If I didn't have family here, I'd definitely move.

</comment><comment><USER56> By stressing lack of downtown locations, this seems be a fluff piece ala "Millenials don't want to drive!".

While there's a lot of competition for talent to leave to Bay Area, lots of folks I know moved here to SD to actually have a life outside of work, since its housing prices are much lower, access to beaches, food, etc. The commuting is better than SF imho, unless you simply cannot or refuse to drive.

</comment><comment><USER57> In my opinion this article and others I've seen like it seem have everything backwards. For new graduates I wouldn't recommend living in downtown San Diego, at least not right now. It's (relatively) expensive and can get old real quick.

Instead I'd suggest trying to find a job downtown or elsewhere and live somewhere more exciting/fun like the beach (Mission/Pacific) or any of the neighborhoods surrounding downtown (North/South Park). The rent is generally <$1000/month, the commute from any of these places is <20 minutes, and there's always something to do.

Also, haven't seen the University of San Diego (USD) mentioned in any of the other comments, but they just opened a standalone engineering school last year, so I'm sure that will also start to attract a lot more talent to the area (biased USD alumnus here).

After doing a 4 year stint in Orange County and just moving back last year, I'd say things are looking better than ever for SD, not worse. I'm glad I moved back and excited to see where it goes from here.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is a situation where part-time telecommuting can work out: live in San Diego, work in North County, but only drive up 1-2 days a week.

</comment><comment><USER58> Would love to move out to San Diego since I have close relatives in that area. I have job prospects in the LA and Bay areas. Took a few (phone / Skype / Google Hangouts) interviews with a couple employers in those areas and all of them went very well. I am on the east coast (glad they settled for remote interviews so far) and both the companies want me to fly out to meet now.

Thought I'd post here in case anyone's hiring. I'd rather live in / near San Diego and be close to family. Love it there.

I work remotely and there's the possibility for me to move while staying at my current job. I am looking to change jobs if I get a better offer since my cost of living will increase when I move to San Diego.

If you have any comments or are looking for experienced (7+ yrs) software engineers please get in touch. Using a throaway account because I don't want my employer to know that I'm looking for a job.

</comment><comment><USER59> To upgrade challenging neighborhoods in New York, developers along with the city politicians created spaces for artists with reduced rents for a specific amount of years. By bringing in artists in the neighborhood would become "trendy" and draw more development. Perhaps San Diego can do the same thing with developers?

Tom Wolfe on "artists are usually at the forefront of neighborhood revitalization..."

[https://books.google.com/books?id=o8GEcPiiKjcC&pg=PA184&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=o8GEcPiiKjcC&pg=PA184&lpg=PA184&dq=tom+wolfe+artists+neighborhood&source=bl&ots=pxv97UBFGd&sig=2dST9d8cuz2ecWdzKvm6rO3Ozs0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi64u2K5ZHPAhUYwGMKHQEEAhIQ6AEINzAE#v=onepage&q=tom%20wolfe%20artists%20neighborhood&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER60> A relevant story. I worked with a friend here in the Bay Area a while back. One day his father in law got sick, and he was forced to move to San Diego. When he started looking for jobs, they were all offing about 20% less money for the same work, despite the fact that at the time the cost of living was almost identical.

When he asked one of them, "why don't you pay as much as the bay area" he was told, "our weather is better so we pay less".

There's only so much suffering you're willing to take for "better weather".

The same could of course be said for Silicon Valley too.

</comment><comment><USER61> It's interesting that he says location is the cause. I think I agree, but then I think about DC, where most of the tech jobs (aside from some government ones) seem to be located outside of the city

<comment><USER62> The problem in San Diego is that although traffic blows, there's no strong public transit like you have in DC.

<comment><USER63> wait what? DC has one of the worst public transit systems of a major city in the world. portions of it are constantly shut down for maintenance. there was a week this summer with 2-3 fires in the system.

"strong" it is not.

carry on

<comment><USER64> Why is this being modded down? It's absolutely correct, as anyone who lives in the DC area would know.

Come to DC and try riding the Metro on Saturday or Sunday night and see how you like it.

Metro used to be a pretty decent system 20 years ago; today it's a disaster.

<comment><USER61> I think the fact that DC has a system puts it ahead of most places.

When people talk about DC they should really be talking about NoVa. And size- wise, NoVa is a sprawling southern city. The fact that the Metro covers most of it is much better than SD, or a closer city like Richmond.

<comment><USER64> I'm sorry, but the Metro does _not_ cover "most" of NoVA. It has a few lines that jut into it, to provide commuting into DC, and that's it.

It is __absolutely useless __if you are working someplace in NoVA, and also live in NoVA. It will not help you get around in NoVA _at all_.

Whether it's better than American cities is irrelevant. The original claim, in a discussion about tech workers and tech jobs, was that the DC area had a good public transit system unlike SD. That is objectively untrue, for tech workers, for the reasons I stated above. The DC metro area is no better for tech workers as far as public transit goes. If you get a tech job in NoVA (or MD), you will absolutely need a car.

If you want to ride the Metro to work, you need to go back to school and get a degree in law or international relations so you can get one of those downtown DC jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Why does tech talent have to be young?

<comment><USER19> Because we've been in a talent shortage for 10 years. By the numbers the available applicant pool is young.

<comment><USER66> There is no shortage, it is just that every company wants to hire all the same rock stars and nobody wants to train anymore.

<comment><USER67> I've definitely observed this here in SD. When I used to go to meetups as an aspiring developer we'd get lots of recruiters looking for "rockstars" or senior developers, and none (?) just looking for talent they could cultivate. I understand this is a by product of people staying at jobs for 1-3 years these days, but come on, where are future rockstars and senior devs going to come from if someone doesn't give them a shot?

<comment><USER19> Can you blame them for not wanting to take the gamble? I was once given a new hire who had a degree in a different field and later went to one of those hacker schools. He was smart, friendly, and a good worker -- but just not cut out for a job writing software. Not only was he unproductive, but he dragged down the rest of the team who had to fix his code and spend extra time going over his code reviews.

<comment><USER30> Can you go into more detail regarding why he wasn't cut out? Did he just not have enough experience at the time to work on software?

It's always interesting to me what makes a 'bad' hire, a 'bad' hire because I'm starting to realize it is very subjective. My motivation level and productivity varies significantly depending on work conditions, and how well I am getting along with colleagues.

<comment><USER19> He could write code just fine (he passed the interview) but he couldn't seem to grasp engineering. He couldn't look at a mock or a system diagram and figure out how to translate that into code. Given multiple approaches a problem, he wasn't ever able to formulate the advantages and disadvantages to each (and would inevitably pick some crazy, obfuscated approach).

Maybe it was just lack of experience, and he'll eventually come into his own -- but he definitely wasted an unacceptable amount of resources for a small company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I live in SF. I have all the complaints and compliments for the city that all of us do. But if someone in SD decides not to move because Sorrento Valley is too far from downtown, they're going to be wildly disappointed. SF is small, but is such a pain to move around in that you end up spending 90% of your time within walking distance of home and work.

</comment><comment><USER69> All of the tech jobs are in bland industrial office parks? Protip: Don't literally emulate Silicon Valley by building your tech scene to resemble boring, culture-less suburban Santa Clara County. Don't build it to resemble overpriced, under-serviced urban San Francisco, either. Innovate a better model.

</comment><comment><USER70> After Qualcomm's layoffs last year I am not sure how many still want to go work for them.

</comment><comment><USER71> seriously? people moving away because there are no good restaurants near work places?

</comment><comment><USER72> [http://www.10news.com/news/tech-company-strives-to-keep- work...](http://www.10news.com/news/tech-company-strives-to-keep-workers-in- san-diego-081616)

</comment><comment><USER73> San Diego has plenty of tech future. Startup scene is rich.

Amazon is here now (Solana Beach; disclaimer I work there) - and hiring.

Google is coming.

</comment><comment><USER74> Many _MANY_ cities are struggling with this -- business parks outside of the city core and the only way between is commute via car.

Frankly this blows pretty hard and the only remediation is reliable public transit between the two, or more to the point, some form of light rail (with frequent all-day every-day service) or even heavy rapid transit. Sadly many municipalities find this unappetizing as the time-frame for such a project stretches past a decade and the cost into the billions, so such cities will inevitably be left to languish.

I can only hope that they start to see the writing on the wall sooner than later.

The complete and total lack of attention to bicycle infrastructure is an issue too, but that is a whole different can of worms.

<comment><USER75> The weird thing for me is how many companies resist working from home (permanently) as a solution. Screwed-up office and housing locations become a _lot_ more palatable when you never have to make that commute.

I'm not sure how it became a thing to distrust employees so much that teams can't even conceive of somebody that is never in the office. The silliest situation I encountered was one a few years ago where a manager couldn't see how ridiculous it was that he _disallowed_ working from home for employees in his own city even though half the people on his team were in another _state_ and he could never keep tabs on them _anyway_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> a lot of people also move north to orange county or los angeles.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your startup's blogging strategy? - <AUTHOR>

I want to start writing a blog for the startup I'm working on, but I'm not sure how to approach it.
For example, say I spend a week implementing a new feature. When I'm done, should I write an article announcing it with screenshots and use cases? Or should I write a technical article explaining how it was built? Or both? On that note, if I'm writing a tutorial for my product, should I post it on the blog and link to it from the support section of my site, or should I write it on the support section and link to it from my site?
And there's more: should I try to position myself as a thought-leader in the spacing I'm working in (mockups/design/ux), by writing high level articles on the subject? And as a sole founder working on this part time, I could write a lot about that too, but I'm not sure how interesting people using my app would find it.
There's a lot of options. If the answer is "all of the above" is there a balance I should strive for? I feel like constant "I added feature X" updates get old after a while and don't contribute to building a community.
If I'm going to write I'd like to get the most value out of it, but I'm not sure how. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> I think the "how I did it" articles work best when you customers are techies as well. They like to see how things work, and if they find the example from your product interesting, they'll give it a try. Depending on how technical your customers are, that might work for design/ux. I think the less technical your customers, the less you want to blog about how you did it, and the more you want to aim for "thought leadarship", and talk about the benefits.

</comment><comment><USER3> You might just look at examples for ideas. One of the longer-lasting successful startup blogs out there is: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/></comment>


Xenobot, a new kind of programmable organism - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/xenobot/ <comment><USER2> Four days ago: "Team Builds the First Living Robots" (uvm.edu) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22040150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22040150)

<comment><USER3> I didn't see the story mention whether there is a signal triggering movements or these things are preprogrammed for certain movements.

<comment><USER4> They're heart cells. Pulsing is what they do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well I was quite shocked with that name

Xenobot - Cheat for Tibia: 2 decades old MMORPG.

<comment><USER6> Haha same, small world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am deeply creeped out by this, but I'm not sure why.

<comment><USER8> I agree. This is one of those things that feels like real science fiction. It feels like the researchers are playing God with parts that they have no idea how they work.

I think I'm in favor of this work, but it is alarming.</comment></comment>


Remote - <AUTHOR> http://robertgreiner.com/2013/11/remote-office-not-required-review/

<comment><USER2> The biggest challenge for me is that I'm starting to realize that people don't really get asynchronous communication as much as I thought they would.

Putting on your headphones at the office and trying to get work done is seen as antisocial and hostile (especially daring to direct people to try to get you on im or email), and you find yourself shut out of critical decision points meetings because people will say "we didn't want to bother you" (what they're really saying is "fuck you, thats what you get for isolating yourself").

People want to be able to get immediate responses and interrupt each other whenever they like, and its easy to be pegged as an "asshole" if you don't play along. If you extrapolate from there, it starts to make sense why remote work is still such a hard sell in a lot of places (last stat I saw is that only about 4% of American workers work from home, thats up from 2% last year, but still)

"Hell is other People" \--- Jean Paul Sartre

<comment><USER3> _(what they 're really saying is "fuck you, thats what you get for isolating yourself")_

I think that's not a charitable interpretation. Two alternative explanations, which are not mutually exclusive:

1\. Most people don't like confrontation or rejection; they find it awkward and uncomfortable, even if it's done politely. After interrupting you a few times, they find that they are generally rebuffed, so they stop interrupting you. But that hesitancy will continue even in cases where they think maybe you would say yes.

2\. They may not really understand _why_ you're redirecting them to asynchronous communication; they don't have a good mental model of how you will respond. Without that, they're not able to assess what you will think is important enough to warrant an interruption. So they err on the side of not interrupting.

<comment><USER4> Theres a term for that! I think its called _passive agression_. Passive agression and active accomodation (ie, being nice) shouldn't be confused though. The purpose of course, for the adversary, is to disguise the former as the latter to gain a tactical advantage. While the laguage used by the parent was (somewhat) blunt, I don't think the pheonomenan he is describing is an empirical anomaly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive- aggressive_behavior](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive- aggressive_behavior)

<comment><USER3> No, that is not what I am trying to describe. Passive aggressive behavior is still acting with malice. I am talking about people who want to do the right thing by someone, but can't figure out what that is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My full time job in technology morphed into work-from-home after about eighteen months. It happened for two reasons: #1, they knew me and trusted me to get the work done, and #2, I was literally the last person on my team still on site. My team's spread all over the world at this point.

I kept going to the office for a while, then realized that, aside from having three monitors on my desk, there was no advantage for me going there, and there are disadvantages. After two years, this is what I've learned.

 _Advantages of remote work:_

\- Time: I save 2-3 hours daily from getting dressed up, making lunch, and commuting.

\- Efficiency: it's quiet in my home office (the family knows to leave me alone while the door's closed). I've got 16 gigs of RAM on my home computer, plenty of disk space, and it's actually faster and better than my work computer. The work computer required so much bureaucratic rigmarole to get it updated that I gave up.

\- Comfort: my chair is always where I left it, unlike at the office :(. My coffee is made the way I like it, unlike the crappy K-Cup thing at the office which never has decaf (I can't drink full caffeine). Lunch consists of pulling a piece of cold chicken out of the fridge 10 feet away. I can walk outside into the conservation land across the street while thinking about a problem.

\- Quiet: I don't have to listen to nonstop irrelevant conversation, computer noises, phones ringing.

\- Financial: We took a trip to Nova Scotia and I managed to work every day from my laptop in wifi hotspots, avoiding using any vacation hours. Of course, it was not a vacation for me during the working day, but the family got to enjoy a nice trip. I do the same when visiting the parents at Thanksgiving--we land Monday or Tuesday evening and I work before the holiday begins. My vacation time has accordingly piled up and I'm going to cash some of it in.

\- Family-friendly: I can pick up and drop off my kid to school, and be at home for her while my wife's at work. No need to pay for after-school or a nanny.

\- Healthy: no stress from commuting. I can go jogging at lunchtime, grab a shower later on in the day. It's just an hour out of my day, whereas there's not even a shower at the office, let alone a gym.

 _Disadvantages:_

\- The fridge, as noted above, is only 10 feet away. Even worse is the bowl of surplus Halloween candy sitting on the counter nearby.

\- Always available means never offline. My manager knows I'm probably at my computer at 9pm or 10pm, so he'll text me with questions. (I always answer. To me, this is the price of WFH: out of fear that some small minded executive will some day say, "You should be in the office from now on so we can better track you", I make sure that they never have reason to doubt my productivity and availability. I'm overcompensating of course, but then I enjoy my work and I am grateful for the flexibility so I return the favor. We're kind of a start-up within a big corporation anyway, so long hours are the norm.)

\- The family sees me sitting there and talks to me. I have to fend them off.

\- Very tempting to spend time on Facebook and other sites such as Hacker News :) I rationalize it as blowing off steam, but jogging's better, really.

<comment><USER6> A bit of a tangent, but am I the only one who finds texts unacceptable in professional situations? I never reply to a text from a client; if it's important, I'll reply to the text FROM an email, but never as a text. If it happens more than once or twice I explain that I don't receive text message notifications on my phone (which is true; I can see them passively but they do not "ping" me), and that to ensure a timely response they should always email or call me.

This means (a) all expectations of me are in one place (my inbox) and (b) I don't have to filter work from my free time. And in the age of smartphones, there's really no reason not to just use email.

<comment><USER7> _This means (a) all expectations of me are in one place (my inbox) and (b) I don 't have to filter work from my free time._

Isn't this a tools problem (ie, at your end)?

I certainly separate my work phone number from my personal one (but that's pretty easy to do these days).

I've never found the SMS vs Email location thing to bother me, but if it does think there are plenty of phone apps that combine them. From memory HTC has one that isn't terrible, and Dias.im[1] looks nice.

What do you do about other message sources though? IM, etc?

I've always considered keeping my work organised something I'm responsible for, and I'd never try to make other work one way or another to fit my tools.

(Disclaimer: I work remotely)

[1] [http://www.cultofandroid.com/42101/disa-im-unified- messaging...](http://www.cultofandroid.com/42101/disa-im-unified-messaging- app-for-android-beautiful-ui/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Funny, I _just_ got off the phone with someone I work remotely with. We communicate asynchronously regularly. And that's great. But sometimes there's no substitute for a 10 minute phone call to discuss a technical topic.

The amount of time it takes for two parties to draft and write responses to technical points can be quite high, and the back-and-forth required to correct misunderstandings can take several round-trips. Talking out loud, simultaneously, can allow for much higher bandwidth.

It also engenders basic empathy, which is a big deal in teams.

Our protocol is usually to ping the other person with a message to see if they can chat.

<comment><USER8> Funny, the last time I suggested that in-person (or at least low-friction real-time audio and/or video) communication is extremely beneficial if not crucial to software teams, especially smaller startups iterating quickly, I was lambasted. One great comment I remember distinctly was that if my job required me to regularly ask another programmer something about a system they had worked on, that means the system wasn't sufficiently documented.

<comment><USER3> That certainly wasn't by me. HN is legion, for it is many.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm in this bummer of a situation where I can work remote from pretty much anywhere I like, but my wife is bound to her 9 to 5 that won't allow her to work remotely for more than a few days at a stretch. She does knowledge work as well, and if she had been with the company for a long time and was super essential to the business they might let her work remotely for the long term, but because she's somewhat replaceable if she goes anywhere too long, she loses the job.

Its a real problem because we need to be back on the other side of the country for family at the moment and she's trapped here by the company HR policy.

Really hoping that this stuff starts to break into mainstream corporate acceptance soon. These older companies are pretty sluggish to adopt remote worker policies, especially for jobs that they can just as easily fill with people on-site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bummer. Hopefully your wife's remote working situation will improve over the next couple of years. Your gig sounds pretty great though, congrats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can personally attest that it is incredibly hard to land a solid remote based job, even if you're very good at it. I have worked remotely most of my career (with frequent visits to the office) but I still see a constant stream of people who prefer to have someone much less skilled and/or capable on site rather than take the chance and hire remotely.

Time zones, contractual arrangements and/or agreements, distance and track record mean nothing if employers are simply not willing to give you the chance. Worse, some do and require you to keep track of every small thing you do (TPS reports, etc), destroying the employer/employee trust and leaving us with painful processes that no one likes to go through.

The other side of the coin is that remote workers often request US-like salaries to companies in much different economies, which leads to an even smaller rate of success ...

Finally, from my own experience, I would never hire someone who would tell me that they would never be able to come to the office at least a few times per year (3-4, a week at a time). Just one week of in-person collaboration can bring drastic improvements and/or discoveries that lead to better products overall.

<comment><USER11> I try to insist on a week in the office at the start of a gig -- I only take remote gigs, unless very short. That's never been a problem. (International gigs are an exception, naturally, but I let the client make the call.)

That week in the office is enough to get to know everybody and vice versa. You do need to actively seek out and talk to everyone, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I should probably read this book but also, I wonder if I could have written it. We've fully embraced remote working and it's fantastic. It has allowed us to hire above our weight class as a small startup, finding and keeping some truly fantastic developers.

I agree completely that communication is key. You really have to over communicate, to the point almost of being annoying to avoid very simple but costly mistakes. I also find that teams can suffer from the low fidelity of text communication with regard to sentiment and emotional content. It's just too easy to assume someone has a voice they do not and to harbor resentment or whatever silently -- especially among introverted developers.

We host occasional Skype lunches with no agenda except to catch up and chat on peoples lives.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really great. I'm glad to hear of another company that has benefited from an all-in approach to remote workers. I think reading the book would be time well spent. You can knock it out in a single day.

<comment><USER12> And I should say I doubt I'd write it well ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing I've found is that the effectiveness of remote work depends somehow on the type of work being done. I'm a currently a grad student, and my advisor is not in town very often. We have frequent skype meetings, but I don't get as much out of it as I do from real meetings. On the other end, I also work on startup projects on the week-ends, with people in different countries and I don't feel the same miscommunication problems in this context.

It is possible that remote working in an academic context is indeed possible, but that the highly technical type of communication required to make it work effectively is beyond my current skill. But my point remains that some types of work are harder to carry out remotely.

</comment><comment><USER14> I work for a major F500 company and while they are currently not allowing any new remote employees, there are still thousands of us. My team is all over the country and I don't have an office to go into.

Honestly when I first started working from home for them years ago, I figured more and more companies would embrace it and it would become much more commonplace. They did it to save money having to house employees somewhere, but I guess other companies don't see it that way. It works wonderfully for getting work done during your own schedule and still be there with your family. Though I still find it amusing when I walk the dog and it's just me and the retirees.

</comment><comment><USER15> While writing my master thesis in electrical engineering (pure matlab based), I found the best way was to go about 2-3 days a week to the shared computer room from the department where other students where working. Most of those days I didn't get as much work done in terms of writing compared to when I was at home, but many days I got new ideas, algorithms or a new perspective by hearing other students talk about a different but related topic or discussing a problem with a college. So for me it was the best way to have both worlds, long phases of time at home for writing and implement stuff and quick interrupted time at the university for some quick code trying new stuff, discussing etc. It was commonly accepted that you are no as productive in the computer room and no one would blame you if you just picked up your notebook and went to a room next door for an hour or so to get stuff done.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been working remotely since approx 3 years as an individual contributor (programmer). Here's my take from an individual's perspective-

There have been rare times, when I have "felt" the need to work from office to be able to collaborate better. Faster and better collaboration: I think that is the only advantage work-from-office has to offer.

BUT, the office distractions in the name of collaboration, far outweigh the advantages of being in office.

Low-latency high bandwidth networks at remote work place tend to remove the pains in online collaboration. It feels just like being there.

"In person meetups" \- I am not too sure if short meetups really help team cohesion. I believe it takes at least 2 work-weeks in office to improve team cohesion that way. I've also found online meets towards common goals (like new product idea brainstorming) - pretty effective in improving team cohesion (or sometimes leads to groupism).

Personally, I find switching work space for a week or couple of days, from my regular (remote) work space - makes me feel better.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Overwork, overweight, and an overgrown beard"

HEY! Them's fightin' words.

<comment><USER5> especially if you're a girl :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> At vLine ([https://vline.com](https://vline.com)) we often work remotely (or from home) and use that as a way to dogfood our service. We just set up a "vLine link" to a TV in our office and people can jump in and out throughout the day when they want to talk. Some people stay connected all day (or just keep the audio on and enable video when they need it).

<comment><USER19> What do you mean by 'dogfood our service'?

<comment><USER20> I was going to explain it myself, but the wikipedia article really covers it well:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The main problem is finding companies allowing remote (and by remote I mean "outside of the US" type of remote, there are not THAT many.

<comment><USER22> I would suspect no remote work hire is a cold hire. Most of the times it is someone which has previously worked on-site and shown to be trustworthy enough to manage themselves when working remotely.

So yes, getting companies who don't know you, and will hire you for remote work based on an interview only is rare.

<comment><USER23> As someone who's worked about 50% remote in the past year, this is not true. I've worked for companies in the US, Mexico, the UK, while based in the Netherlands. One common factor though is they were mostly people already in my network, so there is definitely a trust element - but not a "face to face" trust element necessarily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great article and nice points. Yet another great article from Koding's CEO Devrim Yasar - [http://blog.koding.com/2012/08/freelance-developers-you- are-...](http://blog.koding.com/2012/08/freelance-developers-you-are-the- future-dont-mess-it-up/)

</comment><comment><USER25> What blogging platform is he using?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using Github Pages. [http://erjjones.github.io/blog/How-I-built-my-blog- in-one-da...](http://erjjones.github.io/blog/How-I-built-my-blog-in-one-day/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nice article</comment>


Amazing close-ups of comet Hartley 2 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/11/04/amazing-close-ups-of-comet-hartley-2/

<comment><USER2> Here's the video of the approach: [http://www.nasa.gov/mov/496646main_Aligned_Images_4_Full_Web...](http://www.nasa.gov/mov/496646main_Aligned_Images_4_Full_Web.mov)</comment>


The Intel Comet Lake Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10500K CPU Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/15785/the-intel-comet-lake-review-skylake-we-go-again <comment><USER2> Money quote:

>"As mentioned, 10th Gen Comet Lake is, by and large, the same CPU core design as 6th Gen Skylake from 2015. This is, for lack of a better explanation, Skylake++++ built on 14++. Aside from increasing the core count, the frequency, the memory support, some of the turbo responses, and enabling more voltage/frequency customization (more on the next page), there has been no significant increase in IPC from Intel all while AMD has gone from Excavator to Zen to Zen 2, with sizable IPC increases and efficiency improvements. With Intel late on 10nm, Comet Lake does feel like another hold-over until Intel can either get its 10nm process right for the desktop market or backport its newer architectures to 14nm; so Intel should be trying its best to avoid a sixth generation of the same core design after this."

<comment><USER3> I would imagine that this is what Jim Keller is working day and night at Intel to avoid. I'm really looking forward to what comes out of his work at Intel. Competition is good.

<comment><USER4> I don't think so. I'm not very confident if he is given design or architect duties.

On last few employers, he was mostly a glorified project manager/lead first, and an engineer later.

Intel has more than enough big name architects, and designers to deliver new architectures.

The reason they cannot do it now is because they locked themselves into iterative mode of operation by years of low risk, cow milking projects.

If they can't stop iterating, they have no alternative to continuing milking Skylake just like AMD did with Nulldozer

<comment><USER3> Interesting! Do you have any anecdotes that you can share about his recent roles at AMD and Tesla? From public information, he was the designer of the Zen microarchitecture at AMD.

<comment><USER4> Zen architecture team lead was Mike Clark, engineering lead Suzanne Plummer

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not all bad.

> On the face of it, the Core i9-10900K with its ability to boost all ten > cores to 4.9 GHz sustained (in the right motherboard) as well as offering > 5.3 GHz turbo will be a welcome recommendation to some users. It offers some > of the best frame rates in our more CPU-limited gaming tests, and it > competes at a similar price against an AMD processor that offers two more > cores at a lower frequency.

If you don't mind your CPU drawing 254W of power.

> For recommendations, Intel's Core i9 is currently performing the best in a > lot of tests, and that's hard to ignore. But will the end-user want that > extra percent of performance, for the sake of spending more on cooling and > more in power?

In my experience, I prefer cool running hardware as much as possible. I don't need the absolute most powerful if the costs, heat and noise are going to move the balance too far.

But I hope we see Intel succeed in improving their process and innovating a bit more instead of just shoving more cylinders in the engine and adding nitrous.

Disclaimer: Happy AMD Ryzen CPU owner

<comment><USER6> Please someone correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAICS the core voltage of the i9 1,52V. So with 254W, that thing really draws 167 amps? I guess every μΩ of resistance counts here or the board just explodes?

<comment><USER7> That's already been a problem for a long time. When CPU speed changes the transient currents are ridiculous, and the dI/dt is bananas, too. This is one reason why a few generations ago Intel had to go with a fully-integrated voltage regulator. The mainboard people were unable to build good, efficient VRMs off-chip.

<comment><USER8> Maybe its not possible to regulate such a high current at gigahertz speeds off chip? The board traces and pins might have inductance high enough to negate smoothing capacitors at these speeds?

<comment><USER7> Yeah I mean there's no way a part on the other side of a CPU socket is doing anything in the gigahertz range. Those frequencies are covered by layers and capacitors in or on the package itself. What's hard about modern VRMs is being able to step from Icc(max) to zero while overshooting < 25mv, or the forward load step from nothing to ~200A in an instant without dropping. The specs are in Intel's VRxx docs (eg VR13).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's becoming really difficult to figure out whether an X-core i5 is better or worse (even for a specific purpose) than a Y-core i7 or any other combination of [model, clock_speed, num_cores].

Last time I bought a machine I cut this Gordian Knot by _not giving a shit_ , which has to count as some kind of failure of branding.

<comment><USER10> After GHz stopped mattering (and maybe to some extent it never did)... I lost track of all things CPU and what matters.

Anytime I looked into it I felt like I got a lot of truisms and mixed advice, and the PC enthusiast crowd seems equivalent to the 'pixel peeper' crowd of photography, obsessed with misc stats that I'm not sure will matter to me, or anyone.

<comment><USER11> These days, choose a processor that meets your core count needs and budget. Some applications are primarily single-threaded, so for those you might want a processor with fewer, faster cores. For parallelizable tasks like compiling code (up until the linking stage), more cores is better.

It might also be worth buying an AMD just to support them, but OEMs still mostly favor Intel. Performance per dollar is usually a lot better on the AMD side.

<comment><USER12> Depends on the form factor. On desktop yes AMD might be better for your money but as an owner of Ryzen 3500u laptop I'd recommend Intel to anyone. For some reason Chrome is more janky than my old i5 4300u and it lags when playing 1080p x265 files in every player I've tried.

<comment><USER11> Can you check chrome://gpu and make sure that Video Decode: Unavailable does not appear? Video decode should be handled by your GPU, not the CPU. If this is Linux, then you might not be using the GPU at all, which would explain both symptoms.

<comment><USER12> Hardware protected video decode and out-of-process rasterization are the only ones unavailable. Everything else is Hardware accelerated. Another thing I notice is that GPU stays a steady 20% and rarely every shoots up, which I believe is what contributes to video player lags. No matter what I try in Windows 10 - performance mode, gaming mode it still won't go beyond 20% when playing videos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Through our tests, we saw the Intel Core i9-10900K peak at 254 W during our > AVX2-accelerated y-cruncher test. LINPACK and 3DPMavx did not push the > processor as hard.

That's a lot of power. Granted, on non-AVX code, the max they measured looks closer to 190W but that's still dramatically more than the 140W max that the 16-core Ryzen needs.

<comment><USER14> That is but not beyond what most PSU's can do these days. Also it's only when you're stressing all 10 cores. But it is significant.

<comment><USER15> A buyer might need to ask themselves if they're good with a liquid-cooled setup. Because moving past air-cooled is expensive & potentially messy.

<comment><USER16> I very much doubt these processors actually require liquid cooling.

<comment><USER17> Nah, they'll just throttle.

<comment><USER16> The test bed for this review uses a "Thermalright TRUE Copper" cooler which looks to be an air cooler from the mid-to-late 2000's. Needless to say Anandtech probably didn't run their benchmarks with insufficient cooling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was humming and hawing over moving back to Intel until I read this. So the conclusion I took from this is to wait for Zen 3 to come out and then use the price dumping on Zen 2 cores to get a 65W TDP Ryzen 7 3700X for considerably less coin than a 9700K.

Then do the same with Zen 3 when Zen vNext comes out because I'm not having to buy a new board and socket just to get a miniscule increase in grunt this time or next time.

</comment><comment><USER19> I guess you got to give the skylake architecture some credit. Their 5 year old uarch is still pretty competitive. This is is almost like Pentium 4 vs amd64 days. Wonder if intel will pull out a core2duo.

<comment><USER20> Skylake (and its derivatives) is only competitive if you disregard power usage.

For environments where performance/watt matters (e.g., servers, laptops, etc.), Skylake is significantly behind Zen 2.

<comment><USER21> Skylake (or Intel platform) is still has advantage in laptop/tablet area because of optimization for idle power usage than Ryzen.

<comment><USER22> The 4xxxHS parts seem to be rather competitive there as well. Note that these are monolithic Zen 2 APUs, I suspect this is the same silicon that will ship as 4xxxG parts on the desktop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The new CPUs have the LGA1200 socket, which means that current 300-series > motherboards are not sufficient, and users will require new LGA1200 > motherboards. This is despite the socket being the same size.

Well that is disappointing.

<comment><USER24> seems like a dumb move, but I'm sure they have their reasons.

I bought z390 mobo last year with some very beefy VRMs. it was near the end of the cycle for the 9th gen parts, so I was thinking I would consider upgrading whenever they released the next line of chips. I would honestly consider buying the 10900K if it were compatible with my motherboard, especially now that I'm compiling code at home, but I'm not willing to also pay $200-300 for another high-end motherboard.

I sort of suspect they looked at the last gen motherboards and worried that they wouldn't all be able to handle the increased power demands. maybe they decided not to support that to avoid making people look up each SKU to see if it could handle the new processors.

<comment><USER22> > seems like a dumb move, but I'm sure they have their reasons.

Uhm, Intel has been doing this since always. One generation of boards for one generation of CPUs. At most two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How comes that the fastest desktop CPU's from Intel don't have AVX-512?

The Xeon CPU's have AVX-512.

Laptop CPU's like i3-8121U have AVX-512.

Why not desktop too? This has been going on for years.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps this tells us something about the relative size of the high- performance desktop market compared to the market for MacBook Pros, which have Ice Lake CPUs with AVX-512.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why speculate? If we take i9s to be considered par equivalents to high-end CPUs we find in MacBook Pros, and the market distribution of cheap to expensive CPUs is similar in both desktop and notebook segments, then we can simply look at earnings reports.

[https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_financials/2019/20...](https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_financials/2019/2019-Annual- Report.pdf)

From page 34:

6% of Intel's Desktop platform volume is $705Mn, so total volume is $11.75Bn. 5% of Intel's Notebook platform volume is $1080Mn, so total volume is $21.6Bn.

So the desktop market is slightly larger than half the size of the notebook market, but $12Bn is a lot of money to leave on the table then turn your back to. Especially since an aged microarchitecture threatens all CPU-related revenue streams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Each time I see these kinds of reviews, I take comfort in knowing my eight year old i7 3770k is still chugging along at 4.7ghz OC. Its matched with 16gb ram and a 980 TI, and it handles most modern games at 60fps just fine albeit on lower settings. I also sometimes boot into Ubuntu to write some code while my girlfriend wants to use the macbook, and I just mostly use VSC and write Node or Go apps.

Maybe in the future I'll just get a newer GPU, but for my needs of primarily gaming and coding I don't yet see a reason to upgrade the CPU and motherboard.

<comment><USER27> This is not an unreasonable spot to be in, but it's going to change in the next year or so I think for most gaming stuff.

The Ivy Bridge stuff is a little on the pokey side now; my i5-3570K was in my HTPC until earlier this year when I replaced it with an i7-6700K. But a higher-end Ivy Bridge will still be OK for most games for a little while yet. And a 980Ti is still a great card; I upgraded to a 2070 Super because I needed Turing NVENC but the 980Ti was playing everything great at 1080p and most things very well at 1440p. As things start to target the PS5 and Xbox Series X as their lead platforms, however, I would expect that to change. The PS5 will field eight Zen 2 cores and that's going to be a significant step up. Modern game engines are already really happy with multicore systems (the 3900X in my desktop gets _put to work_ by Doom Eternal) and this will only increase. Increases in expected throughput is going to put the 980Ti in a bad spot, too.

That said, Ivy Bridge and Haswell really have to take the crown for "longest- lived worthwhile CPUs". That HTPC (which was formerly my desktop, and had 32GB of RAM because of it) is now a NAS, and it's great. I wonder how long it'll last.

<comment><USER28> "That said, Ivy Bridge and Haswell really have to take the crown for "longest- lived worthwhile CPUs"".

Sandy Bridge era CPUs (i5-2500/k, i7-2600/k, etc) were the ones that really shook up the market. Much lower power envelope and a large jump in performance from Nehalem. Ivy Bridge was the Tick-Tock iteration of SB, providing higher power usage/heat output (counterintuitively), with about a 5% IPC increase IIRC, based on the famous 3D Tri-Gate process. It was widely considered a bust at the time.

<comment><USER27> I was thinking that, but I know a lot of folks still running Ivy Bridge and don't know anybody still running Sandy Bridge!

<comment><USER28> Ivy Bridge was a minimal upgrade over SB. Higher power consumption with a roughly 5% IPC improvement under certain workloads. It was the trial for the Tri-Gate process, although it ended up being a bust (for that gen, at least - not too up to date with the newer iterations).

Still running a slightly OC'ed i7-2700K here, and a Radeon 290X. In terms of performance, older games run fine in my eyefinity triple-monitor setup, but newer ones I've been playing only in one screen recently, which means it's time for an update. A 9 year old CPU and 7 year old GPU being this fantastic in performance so many years later just goes to show how slowly CPU and GPU improvements have iterated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> These CPUs don't have PCIe 4.

With Microsoft and Sony going all in with their consoles and high speed gen4 SSDs, I'm imagining there's going to be a lot of faster drives on the market soon.

Unless it's an upgrade, I feel buying this CPU for a new build is a bad idea.

If I needed Intel I'd wait until their next generation at least.

<comment><USER30> > _These CPUs don 't have PCIe 4._

I'm fine with PCIe 4 not hitting mainstream for a few more years. AMD X570 motherboards all integrate noisy and failure-prone active fans directly on the motherboard because the chips get so hot. The only one I know about that didn't was wildly expensive, basically all heatsink, and apparently no longer in production.

<comment> ben-schaaf Motherboards used to have issues with the fan running when it didn't need to, but to my knowledge that's been fixed. Unless you're running massive amounts of data through the chipset it doesn't get hot and on most motherboards the fan should stay off.

<comment><USER30> If you're not running truly massive amounts of data through it, then PCIe 4.0 provides no benefit over PCIe 3.0 anyway.

<comment> ben-schaaf The first PCIe slot, at least one of the nvme slots and a fair amount of the IO is connected directly to the CPU, they don't touch the chipset. There's plenty of benefit you can get by using just those. If you're really trying to get the most out of PCIe 4 then you're on the wrong platform anyway. Threadripper has way more IO going directly to the CPU and IIRC some Epyc motherboards have all IO going directly to the CPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Its ridiculous that a brand new 10600K only has at best 33% better single- thread performance than my seven year old 4670K.

<comment><USER20> Outside of specialized instruction sets, I wouldn't expect major leaps in single-threaded performance from either Intel or AMD for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER31> Is that because more cores for a given transistor count better addresses today's computing needs or because we've hit a limit where adding more transistors to a single core doesn't give us more performance anymore?

<comment><USER20> It's because the design techniques that allow a core to run more instructions per clock -- wider execution units, shorter pipelines, etc. -- also tend to reduce the maximum achievable clock speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone know of a good article that explains why intel is having these problems with crappy 5 year old CPUs? Is 10nm going to be competitive with AMD when it finally comes out?

<comment><USER7> The Intel part is on top of every single-threaded benchmark in this article, with a 5-year-old microarchitecture. Whatever you want to say about their failure to scale out the core count or to shrink the lithography, they are still in an enviable position of being able to spend the massive lead they had banked. What's going to be really interesting from here on is the cadence of innovation from both camps. Will Intel ship real product and leap ahead again? Will they ship a new product that's a turd? Will AMD ship another generation of improvements while Intel grinds out another Skylake SKU?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Color me massively confused, but why on earth does the chipset have a 2.5G Ethernet interface that doesn't support 5G/10G?

<comment><USER7> They can do it this way and only use a single PCIe lane; 2.5g works over existing cat5e cable plants and 10g doesn't; their 10g and 40g controllers cost $40 and this one costs $2?

<comment><USER33> PCIe gen3 is nearly a GB/sec in each direction per lane (actual bandwidth obviously less). Which is nearly enough to get to line rate with 10Gbit ethernet, particularly if TSO is employed to remove the framing/etc overhead. Getting 750MB/sec out of a 10G interface because its constricted by PCIe is a lot better than getting 220MB/sec out of 2.5G. Consider the difference when running a VM image from a NAS.

Further, the point with the multimode 1/2.5/5/10 phy's is they do line quality detection and downgrade. So you plug in cat5, and it downgrades to 2.5 if the line quality is bad. Someone runs a 10 foot cat6A cable they are going to get the full speed. But in actuality, as I said on this board before, 10G requires cat6a for 200 meter runs. If your in a house, small office, etc where the runs are 5-10 meters or less cat5e works just fine. I've seen switch vendors mention that quality cat5e can be good up to 45M, which is farther than cat8 is specified for 40GbaseT.

It just looks like more product segmentation since the 10GbaseT spec has been around for about 15 years now.

edit: When it comes to UTP, the frequency response and cross talk specifications effectively end up being per foot. So the line attenuation and noise increases with cable length until it falls below the threshold required to reconstruct the signal at the far end given a standard compliant part. The length and cabling requirements also include the possibility of loss from additional wall jacks or patch panels. So many of the bulk cat 5e cable packs were sold for a long time as 350mhz (or similar) which in name is better than basic cat6 at 250mhz because its actually pretty hard to screw up the twist/etc requirements of the cable. The problems happen when it is poorly terminated. So the whole thing ends up being a bit of a crapshoot whether any given cable works to specification (most aren't) but because they are far below the maximum line lengths it never matters. Plus, in the decade(s) since the specs were initially created semiconductor advances have allowed advances in the receiver sensitivity and efficiency of the drive signal. Meaning if one went back at this point and tweaked the 1G spec its quite likely that the max transmission lengths could at least be doubled due to specifying it with cat5e and tighter margins.

This is also what allows 10GbaseT SFP's today, which weren't initially possible (that and mandating that they aren't compliant to the full 200M).

<comment><USER7> It's not product segmentation. They cut the NIC price to $2 and increased the speed by 2.5x. This is really the only part of the platform that is dramatically faster than it was two years ago. Most of the AMD motherboards are coming with 1gbps ethernet, no matter how many nonsense words are in the product name.

<comment><USER33> The pricing difference is part of the product segmentation, because 10G+ has been reserved for "enterprise" parts despite not being much different at this point. There are ARM SOC's out there, where the bare SOC is in the $40 ballpark and comes with 10G integrated. 10G isn't inherently more expensive, its just been a decision not to repeat the "mistake" that was the 100-1G transition where the price went from $$$$ to 1/10$ in the space of a year.

<comment><USER7> I don't understand what we are talking about. None of the CPUs in this article have integrated NICs. The NIC is a little pea-sized peripheral device on a PCIe port. If the motherboard makers thought anyone needed a desktop platform with 10gbe, they'd ship that. But 10gbe controllers cost a lot of money and draw a lot of power, and take more pci-e lanes. I think they are banking on the idea that people who want it will be happy enough with expansion cards or thunderbolt peripherals.

<comment><USER33> I was mixing cpu+chipset=arm soc.

A 10G port takes the same PCIe lane as a 1G port, particularly if you have PCIe gen4+ or are willing to potentially lose a bit with gen3. Similarly with power, EEE doesn't use the power if its not needed. Which for users on short runs, or with 1G switches the power utilization will be the same as a 1G port. And given that we are talking 200W parts, a watt or two for 10G isn't going to be missed.

And probably more of the motherboard manufactures would put 10G nics on board if there weren't a dearth of 10G pci nic chips from manufactures not already selling PCIe nics as high margin products. AKA intel selling its 10G part for more than the rest of the parts on the motherboard is going to keep motherboard manufactures from putting it on every motherboard.

Its sort of been a game of chicken, which will explode violently when the patents expire and a company like etron or asmedia starts producing them. (both of which have shown plenty of inhouse capability for producing high speed phy/etc interfaces).

<comment><USER34> I think you severely under estimated the cost difference in 2.5G/5G SerDes to 10G, and the cut throat nature of PC business, where $1 of BOM cost is a world of difference.

There is also the question of ecosystem like switches. The TCO of owning 10G is still pretty much out of reach for most consumers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The difference between CPU's at similiar price points is getting to be negligible.

[https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15785/116023.png](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15785/116023.png)

For 50% of the price, you're only losing 30% in performance.

<comment><USER36> Any clue on why that $1700 CPU is performing so poorly relative to the rest in the chart?

<comment><USER37> it's a 10 core from the time (2016) when that core count was somewhat exotic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > We know that AMD's Zen 2 has as a slight 10-15% IPC advantage over 9th Gen > Coffee Lake,

How they calculated it? I had only heard that Zen2 IPC is 15% increased from Zen+. And from Single threaded benchmark, Zen2 not seems like 10% over Skylake.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm more interested in the Xeon W-1260P, which seems to be an i9-10900K with ECC enabled. It should work very well for my engineering software (which uses Intel math libraries that are slow on AMD). Hopefully they come out with it soon.

<comment><USER39> Those are pretty interesting, especially with 40 PCIE lanes.

I wonder if (like the z490) the W480 motherboards will support PCIE gen4, and whether there will be Rocket Lake Xeon W 1300 CPUs.

<comment><USER40> According to [0] it has 16 lanes. They probably are counting chipset lanes which are fake lanes.

0: [https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/199336/...](https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/199336/intel- xeon-w-1290p-processor-20m-cache-3-70-ghz.html)

<comment><USER39> Ah, I see. Their marketing material referred to "total platform lanes"[0]. That's less helpful.

[0] [https://www.servethehome.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/05/Inte...](https://www.servethehome.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/05/Intel-Xeon-W-1200-Series-SKU-Stack.jpg)

<comment><USER7> If you want more PCIe lanes in a Xeon, you need a Cascade Lake part like the W-2275, 48 lanes and 4-channel memory, too.

<comment><USER39> Oh certainly. 16 CPU lanes is perfectly reasonable. I just feel somewhat misled by the marketing material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The price is usually the problem.

<comment><USER14> Frankly these look competitive with AMD price wise.

<comment><USER42> Are they? The i5-10600K sells for $262. Its closest competitor is ryzen 3600/3600x, which currently sell for $172/$200 respectively. For $62 (33%) more, is it really 33% faster than AMD? There are lower tier skus (eg. i5-10500) that match AMD's pricepoint, but I doubt they match 3600/3600x's performance. At the high end, the i9-10900K ($488) is competing against the ryzen 3900x, which currently sells for $400 and has 20% more cores.

<comment><USER43> It's the motherboard prices that will make the difference. Intel motherboards are always super overpriced, and you have to buy a new mobo with every generation.

<comment> ben-schaaf That and you also need to factor in the cooler. The consumer Ryzen chips all come with an adequate cooler, which can save you a significant amount over the Intel chips especially considering the extra heat output you'd need to handle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The i9-10900T is interesting at 10C/20T at 35W tdp.

But I'm afraid that it's going to be one of those parts reserved to OEMs, like the 45W Ryzen 3600 (non-X).

</comment><comment><USER45> I wonder if they will dare to go to i11?</comment>