Hi-Tech Paradise Lost, Boston Globe
For companies outside of Silicon Valley, the call of the wild - or at least a more balanced life - has succeeded in snagging technology employees yearning for less stressful careers, shorter commutes, or more buying power than is possible in the Bay Area, where the average sales price of a single family home in Palo Alto in November hit $899,255, up 30 percent over last year's prices.
'It discourages people from coming to work here, and evntually it will cause a problem in bringing good people to work in the high-tech industry,' said Douglas Tobin, president of the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors in San Jose.
Tobin recalls spending a day last year ferrying an engineer from Dallas who had just gotten a substantial job offer from a Silicon Valley semiconductor company. The engineer brought pictures of his Dallas home, a two-year-old, 4.000-square-foot house on a half acre of land that was valued at about $225,000. To get a comparable house in Los Altos, an enclave for Valley executives, the engineer would have had to spend $1.5 million.
'He just said `no way' and went back to Texas,' Tobin said.
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