Hawaiʻi's Technology Community
The Great 2009-2010 Hawaii Brain Drain
At recent developer events, including today's UX Design Meetup, the effect of the great 2009-2010 Hawaii brain drain was readily apparent. Seth Ladd, Anthony Eden, Sam Joseph, Truman Leung, Ken Mayer, David Neely, Sherwin Gao, Seri Lee, Gabe Morris, Alex Salkever, Laurence Lee, Ken Berkun...this is just a handful of quality people I know personally. The list of talented tech industry people who have left or will soon be leaving over this very short period of time is truly depressing. Hawaii has experienced a series of brain drains over the past two decades, the most recent being in 2003/2004, but this is the worst I've seen by a long shot.
As Hawaii tech companies (largely 221 funded) collapse, the engineers and designers who were working for them aren't looking locally for new jobs. They are leaving our state, and it won't be easy to get them back. If we can't retain talented developers and creative personalities in our state the innovation economy is in serious trouble (not that this is news to anyone in the industry.) Any tech business owner who has recruited from the mainland or internationally knows its hard to relocate people to Hawaii. Many people view Hawaii as a vacation spot, but not a serious place for technology innovation. Employers have a hard time with questions such as, "I have three children. How is the public school system?" or "Will I be able to afford a house?" For younger professionals from the Bay Area or East Coast who don't have connections to Hawaii it can be hard to settle socially. Many relocations, which can be very expensive, fail in the first year.
I'm an optimistic person by nature. I believe we can still build an innovation economy in Hawaii, but we need to learn from our mistakes, identify our strengths, apply a healthy dose of pragmatism and a whole lot of elbow grease. Aside from fixing our horribly broken public education system, there isn't a lot the government can do to solve this problem for us. Its up to entrepreneurs and tech business leaders to come up with a plan for sustainable growth of a uniquely Hawaiian innovation economy.
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Comment by Brian on September 5, 2010 at 8:31pm
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Maybe we should rename this thread the "Great Hawaiian Blame Game" ;)
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Comment by Daniel Leuck on September 5, 2010 at 3:02pm
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Hi Guys - I hope everyone is having a great weekend. I was going to respond to the question about Hawaii's desirability but I see John has already covered this. When I'm talking about what is or isn't a draw for programmers coming to or staying in Hawaii, I'm not theorizing. We hire people locally, currently six with two more coming soon, and have people on the mainland. We aren't a big company (we have no interest in hiring 100 average programmers), but I have a decade of experience as a Hawaii business owner and tech employer, and during that time I've had to compete with mainland companies for top programmers including local devs willing to leave and mainland people willing to move to Hawaii.
I'll be honest in saying that I've won some of these battles and I've lost some. In the few cases we haven't been able to get people we wanted it was usually for the reasons Reichart enumerated - distance from family is number one, followed by the cost of living (sometimes perceived more than real*), fear of island fever and a lack of seasons. The opportunity to live in Hawaii has been a significant factor in our favor in many of these negotiations where a person has multiple desirable offers. We've won a couple of these even when up against Google and Amazon. We've also lost one candidate to Google.
* In two cases I was dealing with people who were trying to compare the cost of their setup in suburban northern California - an acre of land, large two story home, etc. to an equivalent setup in Hawaii. They didn't understand that people in Hawaii usually don't have 15,000 sq. ft. homes because they don't spend as much time inside.
On an unrelated note, I like several of Reichart's product suggestion and intend to start using Dr. Bronners soap :-)
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Comment by John on September 5, 2010 at 2:05pm
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Reichart, Feel free to share a link to the time share research. It's hard to discuss (or debate) without seeing the report/position.
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Bandwidth limitations in Honolulu are fairly similar to the US mainland. The US is fairly famous for it's bandwidth limitations - e.g., - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/broadband_speeds_around_the_wo... and http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/05/26/us-lags-behind-world-in-b...
We rarely have issues with skype, voip, webinars, etc. For instance, we regularly hold gotomeeting webinars with people from all over the world with a regular roadrunner connection and it works great - sound quality strong, smooth video presentations.
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Comment by Mark Boon on September 5, 2010 at 10:49am
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@Reichart: "I would also rather buy something for a little more made better." This is something I hear often. If I'm honest with myself I know that it's an illusion though. On the one hand I hate the poor quality and tell myself (and everyone who care to hear) I'd happily pay up for better quality (assuming that's what 'buying American' implies), only to mindlessly forget such ideals when I'm actually in a store.
With respect to telecommuting: Hawaii could use some better infrastructure to support that. At work it's rather pathetic how poor the VOIP conference calls often are and how unreliably Skype works. Now with my personal frustration wrt internet I feel like being thrown back to the Middle Ages. I was used to 20Mbps in Amsterdam and had some trouble adjusting to the medieval speeds of 1Mbps in Rio de Janeiro. That Hawaii is only marginally better than Rio is disappointing.
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According to the most widely cited recent survey of where Americans want to live, Hawaii ranks 8th of 50 states. See: page 36 of Pew Research's study. The question lists all 50 states, asking respondents to pick one. Hawaii received 3% of the responses. Hawaii beat out Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Massachusetts and dozens of other states.
The survey also asked about cities. The question did not list Honolulu. However, cities with warm/temperate climates had strong showings.
Certainly the strongest barrier/negative is the physical distance of Hawaii to the mainland US. However, all of the Internet trends reduce the impact of physical distances and bodes well for a long-term increase in Hawaii desirability.
As for hermits/attracting people to Hawaii, I think you want people who either don't care for or find the valley/tech lifestyle to be unattractive. The problem with that is the most ambitious/hard-working people *tend* to like the fast pace valley atmosphere.
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U6 is misleading because for example.. a spouse that has children and now works part-time is "unemployed". I realize that's probably a niche case but it seems the only time people jump on U6 to bang its anthem is when they want to make unemployment look dire. Another example is people that return to school.
U6 is really a way to assess how the workforce is UNDER employed. U3 and U4 are a bit more reasonable for assessing "unemployment".
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Comment by Boris Ning on September 4, 2010 at 7:35pm
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From the Wave Hawaii website:
http://thewavehawaii.com/index.php/archives/commentary/leaving-home...
Rory Flynn points out that out-migrating (brain dump) is an economic indicator.
He highlights many problems that are very interesting and worth looking into.
For one, the current Hawaii unemployment rate (roughly 7.6%) that headlines report is not the most accurate indicator of the current Hawaii economy. If you use a different scale on the unemployment rate, it actually jumps up to 13.3% in the second quarter of 2009. (read the website)
The first half of the paper outlines the history of this brain dump problem and the second half (starting from Sticky vs. Magnetic) proceeds to answer of what we can do about it.
In the article half way down, he also mentions that we are laying "minefields for private enterprise to such a degree that we cannot furnish jobs to sustain our population...".
@Reichart: I think it will be rather difficult to attract hermits to Hawaii with it's lack of a good foundation for business and high cost of living.
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Comment by Cameron Souza on September 3, 2010 at 6:39pm
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Perhaps there has been a general exodus of techies from cities the size of Honolulu (<1M) who lack familial connections or other geographic ties to places like NY and the Bay Area.
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Comment by Bruce M. Bird on September 3, 2010 at 6:25pm
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Hi. It saddens me that a number of talented engineers and designers have decided to leave Hawaii.
I live on the Mainland in a suburb of Atlanta, GA. Within the last year or so, Atlanta ranked #12 in a report by the Milken Institute as a "Top 25 High Tech Metropolitan Area". Most of the 25 areas in the Milken report have a number of things in common. Most are in --or near-- the GMSAs of large cities that have deep pools of highly-educated workers. Most have universities with "world class" math, science, and computer science departments. Many of the areas on the list are desirable places in which to live. The federal government has a significant presence in many of them, too. Hawaii has some of these features.
By the way, the current job market for high-tech professionals in Atlanta is somewhat challenging. I know of a number of well-educated, creative, and hard-working tech professionals in Atlanta who are currently out of work. Most of them had good-paying jobs with large corporations and simply fell victim to corporate downsizing. While most of them would presumably like to remain where they are, eventually, some of them may find it necessary to move elsewhere. My sense is that times are somewhat tough not only in Hawaii, but also in many parts of the Mainland.
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