Tech jobs are already in the Valley, but legislators need to push for more

If you want to get a glimpse of Google’s self-driving cars, you’ll have to look a little outside Silicon Valley.

The company is busy making sure the cars can handle unexpected situations, like being cut off by a human-driven car. But it’s doing it in a town of just 27,000 in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley: Atwater.

Atwater is 126 miles from Google’s Mountain View headquarters, but it is the ideal place for Waymo – Google’s self-driving car spinoff – to perfect its technology. The old Castle Air Force Base has been transformed into a tech center, complete with a fake town where Waymo can test drive its cars. In the heart of California farm country, new technology is rising.

Waymo is still an outlier in the region, where the unemployment rate is half-again that of California as a whole. But Waymo shows the possibility of developing more tech jobs in the San Joaquin Valley.

At our recent Valley to Valley forum, an event meant to connect leaders in Silicon Valley to leaders in the San Joaquin Valley and beyond, we saw firsthand how this area is evolving to become part of the tech economy.

UC Merced, for example, is becoming a hotbed of engineering talent. Only 25 percent of the university’s engineering students come from the region, but 40 percent are employed there after graduating. Some of these workers are taking advantage of the low cost of living in the Valley and the increasingly mobile nature of online work that allows employees to live anywhere. While too many of them are making the long daily commute to Silicon Valley, an increasing number are finding good jobs at local businesses.

In addition to Waymo, there’s Recurrent Energy, which is transforming farmland into large solar developments that harness the area’s sunshine for economic growth. The company provides cleaner energy and infrastructure investments and its solar farms create job opportunities that Recurrent hires and trains local workers to fill.

The Los Angeles Harbor Department recently signed a deal with Merced County to establish a trade pipeline/transportation corridor between the Valley and the port. Much of the work in Merced will be manufacturing, but logistics is a prime space for technological innovation and disruption.

What emerged from our Valley to Valley conversations was that tech leaders should view the Central Valley as a land of opportunity. A proposed high-speed train between the Central and Silicon Valleys would go a long way toward not only carrying workers from the San Joaquin Valley to Silicon Valley, but also toward moving more tech opportunities east.

The area offers certain advantages that can’t be found in Silicon Valley. For companies that want to work on projects outside of the tech industry fishbowl, there are plenty of opportunities to build and work in the San Joaquin Valley. And as Silicon Valley becomes increasingly unaffordable to people just starting out in the industry, companies setting up shop in Merced can attract a wider variety of candidates.

The Internet for All Now Act (AB-1665), which goes into effect on Jan. 1, will help close the remaining digital divide in the state – nearly 1 in 5 Merced residents lacks access to high speed broadband – and create the possibility for more technical jobs to move to the region.

Making this vision a reality will take more than just the good will of the tech industry. Legislators in Sacramento must challenge themselves to think beyond Silicon Valley when it comes to technology policy. They must support policies that encourage innovation and investment, build infrastructure, provide technical training programs and enable the benefits of California’s technology industry to expand to larger swathes of the state.

This story was originally published December 11, 2017 at 5:19 PM with the headline "Tech jobs are already in the Valley, but legislators need to push for more."