If you are an engineer in the energy industry…many roads lead to Houston. This thread illustrates that there are areas of critical mass in certain industries if people want to take advantage of them. Or not.
I think he has a point for tech, maybe. A lot of companies are headquartered in SF, and if you put yours in the middle of nowhere, it may be hard to recruit top talent. From what I’ve heard, recruiting is a big deal in certain industries; I think my friends told me that finance as a group moved recruiting up this year for undergrads because a few firms moved theirs initially.
Other industries obviously have their own centres. Being at a place with top people in of itself does seem to have its benefits; at one of my lectures from a few days ago, the professor told us that X, Y, Z discovery was made at our university/in NYC. A larger number of high quality collaborators could be beneficial. OTOH, I heard from someone who worked at Rockefeller, in the lab of a Nobel Prize Winner, that people in his lab locked up reagents to prevent other people from damaging them because of competition. He’s now a PI at a major public university in Canada. Another one of my research mentors suggested that it’s better to make your career somewhere big, and settle with more money at a different school. He did an insanely productive postdoc at an Ivy and then came back to Canada. Another researcher I spoke with told me that you just have to follow the money - he and his wife are from Australia, and they’re currently settled in Western Canada because that university was the only one that gave them both offers. They all do very cool work.
The common thread that I see is that it’s probably easier to start your career somewhere where a lot of exciting stuff is happening (this can be in either a big city or small one, but the exciting stuff is likely concentrated in the former) and then you can decide after.
Personally, I find NY really tiring and dirty. I would like to settle somewhere more relaxing, where I can play tennis at a local club in peace and not pay insane amounts for everything.