As an LA resident engineer myself, my theory (backed by an extensive amount of no facts whatsoever), is that engineers are more likely to "end up" in LA than to deliberately move there.
Almost every coworker I have had is in LA because they needed to move closer to family due to illness, they moved there because their girlfriend/wife is in some grad school program at UCLA, their girlfriend/wife is trying the acting/performing thing for awhile, etc. Engineers in situations like those don't have much flexibility in taking much under market rates and basic perks (namely health insurance).
Also, as Paul Graham said in one of his essays, Los Angeles' identity is "you should be famous," and unfortunately, software engineering isn't known for breeding famous people outside of our TechCrunch echo chamber. In the Bay Area, founding a successful startup makes you a rock star. In Los Angeles, just about the only thing you can do to be a rock star is to be a rock star.
Interesting that you should mention that. I've been thinking about ways lately to make software developers more famous - as I think the work that we do is as creative and difficult as the work done by actors, musicians, etc.
Most of my thinking has focused on how to get the general public to actually think about the developers behind all of the software they already use. This may not work for something massive like Google search, but for applications developed by small teams (mobile ones especially), I believe there's a lot of opportunity to grant the individual some notoriety (if they want it, of course).
I would want to start with influencers - existing celebrities. Celebrities often tweet when they love (or don't love) an app that they just started using on their mobile phones. I wonder how hard it would be to enable them (and more importantly incentivize them) to shout out to the individual developers of the app in these tweets.
Note that all this takes place in an optimistic framework where Hollywood is meritocratic and fame is earned. I know it's not so in a lot of cases, but I still think an opportunity exists for developers who create compelling, popular apps to receive some personal recognition.
I've been trying to do good photographs of startup entrepreneurs in their environments (office, walking in the Bay Area, etc.) The purpose is to have a story that's more focused on the person rather than strictly the business. I kind of thought about this after meeting the guys at Bump many many months ago and thinking how cool they were but no one who ever used the application would ever really know.
The only thing that's stopping me is the fact I don't personally know that many devs doing startups in SV because I'm usually holed up designing and developing.
Another problem is that there is no "Category Killer" company which can incubate tech focused entrepreneurs like there is in SV. In SV there are companies liek Paypal, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. who attract top engineering talent. Had there been a category killer company produced in Socal I think there'd be a much different tech landscape.
I don't know about Paypal and Facebook, but interestingly enough, both Google and Yahoo have/had fair-sized offices in Southern California, though Yahoo's has gone the way of all Yahoo.
This is about right. Silicon Valley has a strong support network for entrepreneurs, the best funding environment in the world, and plenty of great large companies that look positively on startup experience. So the personal risk involved in joining a startup is low: you might miss out on opportunity cost and lose savings while in the startup, but the future career risk is nil. This isn't true in most of the country.
I think that is the biggest part. In SV and other good startup scenes its very well known and understood that startup experience is looked upon positively.
So even if your startup blows up you can always get a great job at Xcorp afterwards
As a counterexample, I moved to Southern California specifically to run a startup. There were many reasons, but talent acquisition was never one of them.
Interesting enough, though, we have been discussing the possibility of moving to Nevada for shipping logistics and taxation reasons. As before, talent acquisition is very low on the list of considerations.
This fits my feeling that one aspect of the disparity is that tech personnel in So Cal startups aren't offered as good a compensation terms, that lowers the population willing to take the startup risk because the potential payoff is generally lower.
Almost every coworker I have had is in LA because they needed to move closer to family due to illness, they moved there because their girlfriend/wife is in some grad school program at UCLA, their girlfriend/wife is trying the acting/performing thing for awhile, etc. Engineers in situations like those don't have much flexibility in taking much under market rates and basic perks (namely health insurance).
Also, as Paul Graham said in one of his essays, Los Angeles' identity is "you should be famous," and unfortunately, software engineering isn't known for breeding famous people outside of our TechCrunch echo chamber. In the Bay Area, founding a successful startup makes you a rock star. In Los Angeles, just about the only thing you can do to be a rock star is to be a rock star.