Why Tech Leaders Are Following Google to Portland

I never truly experienced the great Portland-Seattle tech migration first hand. Oh, sure, I always heard about it in the background. People couldn’t afford the Bay Area, so periodically various acquaintances might disappear to the rainy north.

Skilled American tech workers are leaving the Bay Area faster than they are arriving, so I haven’t been all that surprised. It didn’t really hit home, though, until recent months when a long-time, close coworker and friend, Janine Kahn, who I worked with at Village Voice Media in days gone by, decided to get out of Dodge (or San Francisco in my case). She’d always been one of my best San Francisco media friends, and we shared countless lunches and cupcakes. Time marches on though, and she eventually got an even better position running the digital editorial side of Lumina Media. Even more importantly, she found a good man, who became her husband. This good man found a fancy job in Oregon.

“My husband, who also works in tech, got a job as a senior engineer at a dev. agency in Portland, and I work remote, so we decided to give it a shot,” she says. “It doesn’t hurt that we’re renting an entire house for less than our SF one-bedroom now.”

Yes, that type of story forms much the core of why there’s a Pacific Northwest tech migration.