Several of my friends have been out of work for a long time. They have software and internet backgrounds. What's going on?
I haven't seen San Francisco hit so hard by business leaving in my lifetime.
I think the reason is that San Francisco is a business and culture generator. When the businesses succeed and grow, the consolidation that comes to the mature industry means the consolidated business moves to a more traditional environment. Consolidated businesses move to places where labor and management are more conservative and established than in San Francisco.
Wells Fargo and Bank of America are good examples. They were founded in San Francisco, gobbled up most of the banks in California and then were consolidated. The consolidated banks moved to Minneapolis and North Carolina respectively.
The firms that are still in the S. F. Bay Area are the ones that started here. Schwab, H-P, Intel and Apple started here in a variety of recent new business boom periods.
Other native firms that aren't long for this local world are Gap and Genentech. Gap will be bought out fairly soon.
Genentech is part of a current ferment of recent biotech firms that are flourishing now but will someday be consolidated and move out.
Biotech is the current growth sector and will probably be one of the few areas of job growth for the near future. Biotech is an example of San Francisco being the generator of new businesses. San Francisco Area has been the center of new biotech for twenty-five years due to the talent, the academic milieu and entrepreneurial imagination of the area.
My software and internet friends saw their jobs spread like seeds around the countryside and some jobs went overseas. They may not fit into the biotech lab.