

Geography's The Fuck - JasonPunyon
http://jasonpunyon.com/blog/2013/01/20/geographys-the-fuck/

======
simonsarris
This is tough to comment on because it feels a bit loaded. I think this is an
important post in its own right, something we should all be talking about, but
at the same time I think its somewhat tangentially related to what raganwald
was ranting about. (I'll try to comment evenly with my personal experience to
tie them together, sorry about the horn-toot in the process.)

I totally agree that the importance of geography is only occasionally touched
upon, usually when working-from-home topics arise.

But it's crucial.

I know a lot about canvas. I'm the top answer-er on StackOverflow for Canvas
and HTML5 tags. By _far_. I love it, I love helping people. Because of this I
get emails weekly from people with various issues and I try to reply to them
as best I can. Job offers come in too, from uh, one corner of the globe (a
little place called California). I reject all of them out of hand[1] because
they reject me out of hand, because I won't move.

It might sound like I'd work somewhere special or prestigious (do they still
say that about companies?), but I don't.

 _I'm a person before I'm a programmer._ And I always will be. And I have a
family and friends and a home in New Hampshire and I want to stay here, even
if that means staying with my teeny tiny less-than-ten-person company. And I
probably get paid a pittance of what I might get paid out in CA (chuckles were
had when I last mentioned my salary on the phone).

But I walk seven minutes to work every day. And lunches are paid, and I feel
relaxed and at home, and at noon I can go home (paid lunches, no clock) and
cook eggs and swing by the cafe to find fresh coffee and see the faces Jed and
Emily and Sam and Alyssa and all the others that I know and love. Just seeing
some of the same people every day, people I've known for years, brings me
immense joy.

I'm not curing cancer, but at the end of the day I do feel accomplished and
refreshed and loved by coworkers and friends in my tiny little world.

Well. I think I've sort of lost the point I was getting at in my own head.
Anyway, suggesting people merely uproot their lives seems like the height of
insanity, and while many a brave soul do it, I don't think I ever could, not
even for cancer-curin'.

[1] One company to date has said that not-relocating my entire life is OK with
them.

------
SCdF
I can only speak from my perspective, but the main reason I'd only click on
ones that are near me is because I live in NZ, and there is little point me
seeing a bunch of jobs in the valley, unless they're big fans of people
working from home in vastly differing timezones.

(move to the states you say? I'm not a fan of your bread. Sorry.)

~~~
alxndr
Bread? Really?

~~~
potatolicious
Yes, really. In a lot of places in the US what passes for bread is like
processed cheese - possibly tasty, but a pale facsimile of the real thing.

"Real" bread does exist in the US, though usually only in wealthy communities,
and even in those places is considered relatively boutique. Middle America's
definition of bread would shock anyone coming from a bread-heavy culture.

~~~
codewright
Don't put this on Middle America. I come from a long line of German bakers who
settled the American Midwest. We know just fine what good bread is.

~~~
potatolicious
This may be a confusion of terminology - I've always thought "Middle America"
referred to middle-class, suburban America, as opposed to the Midwest in
specific. If I've misused the word, my bad.

I grew up on various derivations of Wonder Bread on the West Coast, FWIW.

I've lived in a bunch of different places, and invariably good bread was only
to be found in relatively wealthy areas. I suspect though, sanity in baking
returns once you get rural enough.

~~~
codewright
My misunderstanding I suppose :)

Edit:

The bread gets better because when all you can afford is the materials to make
bread and your time is cheap, it becomes worthwhile to optimize that process.
(Sie poor)

If you don't have the surplus value to allocate to making bread, but your time
is still too "valuable" to allocate towards making better bread, you eat crap
bread. (Middle America)

If you have surplus value to slosh around, then fuck it. (Rich peeps)

------
emperorcezar
Very much so. I moved my family to the outskirts of Chicagoland so we'd be
really close to my kids grandma. Great choice. Even though I technically can
commute into Chicago everyday, the 1:15 trip can wear me down.

So even though I'm in "Chicago" I still care for a job that allows remote
work. It's a quality of life issue.

I would never move to California. It just won't happen, my family is more
important than working for some company that has no interest in working
asynchronously.

In addition. I know that a company that has the infrastructure to support
remote work, will have the infrastructure to support different hours. Most
developer around here are early 20s, single, and can wake up at 9, roll into
work at 10, and come home at 6.

I'm up at 6 every morning with my kid. If I get inspiration, I don't want to
be held up by a restrictive process.

------
redguava
"Raganwald poses an interesting question. Why do some of the best minds in our
industry spend time figuring out how to make people click more on ads?"

Your answer is:

"One simple answer to the question is Geography."

There are two problems with your answer:

1\. He isn't asking how to get more people to click on ads, he is asking why
our best minds are working on that problem.

2\. Geography isn't the answer to people clicking on ads, it just happens to
be very important if it's a job ad (according to your experience). There are
plenty of ads that aren't for jobs and Geography is not the answer.

It is interesting to hear your findings about job ads, but the context of your
post and the summary of the results don't seem to fit.

~~~
mvzink
You and guynamedloren clearly didn't read past the second heading. The point
of the article is that geography is one important factor for why people don't
work at jobs that matter.

~~~
mbesto
_"Why do some of the best minds in our industry spend time figuring out how to
make people click more on ads?...One simple answer to the question is
Geography."_

 _"Why do some of the best minds in our industry spend time figuring out how
to make people click more on ads?...One important factor to answering that
question is Geography."_

See the difference?

~~~
mvzink
Simple answers lose again!

------
jholman
Okay, this was a valuable and interesting rant, and I'm not knocking its
general observations.

But as a specific reply to the questions literally asked in Raganwald's post,
it's wrong. Maybe it's connecting with the spirit of the question, I'm not
sure, but it's failing on the letter of the question.

Raganwald asked about Google, Facebook, Apple, and people "trying to remix the
same five or six tired 'social' ideas in the hope of being acqui-hired". Those
people mostly work in Silicon Valley. And almost all of them are immigrants to
the Bay area.

Case study: On my team of 30, I think there are half a dozen people from the
Bay Area, if that. And then there are Canadians, Australians, Germans,
Indians, Chinese, and more (and I mean people who lived and worked in those
places until a few years ago, not people whose parents were from those
places). There are a lot of Ohioans, there are folks from Florida and some
Carolina and Texas. Anywhere at Google, "where are you from" is a reasonable
conversational gambit, because it's not here.

So, uh, no. Geography is not the reason "the greatest minds of our generation
toiling away in the Googleplex [and elsewhere in Silicon Valley] ... trying to
figure out how to get Scott Hanselman to click on ads [and whatever other
allegedly low-value things we're doing]".

------
bennyg
Maybe I'm an outlier, but as someone from Alabama, I'm more inclined to click
on job postings from sunny California.

Just clicking on Careers 2.0 shows me one job near Tuscaloosa AL for something
that doesn't sound remotely interesting (obviously that's subjective). If that
showed me stuff near Huntington Beach, San Francisco, or LA - I might be
inclined to click on it. In fact, and this may be an unpopular opinion or
maybe you're already doing this because I don't have an account on
StackOverflow, but have you thought about matching jobs to most-common
programming languages searched for info? I constantly search for Objective-C
information but the only listings I see on my cursory click are for C#/ASP,
HTML5/CSS3, Visual C++, PHP, Systems Software Dev Lead, and jQuery Master.
This does come down to privacy but we gladly give Google that info, and I
trust StackOverflow if all this would be for is getting me a better job in a
field I'm actively seeking information in.

For me, I would take your algorithmic approach a step further. For known tech
hubs / top 100 cities (at least in the US) your approach probably works
wonders. For others, I would recommend feeding in geographic locations on the
coasts out of the top 100 cities, radiating inward. Also I would add the
programming language filter in as well.

Again, most of this is probably terrible from a privacy standpoint and you're
probably already doing it by some means. But on cursory glance, these are the
things that actually matter to me when job searching.

And I know this is only tangentially related to the point of your blog post
haha.

------
flatline
Well, "geography" apparently answers the question as to how to get more ad
clicks. Not sure it had much to with the original question though, aside from
the fact that we choose a job because it's _there_ , for some relative value
of there.

~~~
Firehed
I think you totally missed the point: geography generated higher clicks on
this ad because people were overwhelmingly more interested in the _location_
of a job than _what it was for_.

Because Diabetes AutoMeters Inc™ that Raganwald thinks should get the
engineering energy isn't located in the valley, it won't attract engineers
from the valley. Similarly, because so many ad-driven companies _are_ in the
valley, many of the engineers that want to be (or already are) in the valley
tend to end up working on advertising stuff.

------
ytadesse
From the little I've read about him, Raganwald seems like a rather smart guy
so I'm fairly certain that he's well aware of the effect that various economic
forces have on the decisions that people make in regards to employment/etc...

Having said that, Raganwald is essentially advocating for people to consider
using their knowledge and effort on more noble causes than adding features to
a website to get more clicks and make more money.

------
beatpanda
I think this post illustrates why several recent articles advocating against
remote work are severely misguided.

It is marginally less efficient for your company to support remote work than
to have everyone in the same place, but it's _absolutely critical_ if we want
to be able to connect the best people to the best, and most important,
opportunities.

------
merraksh
Dear HN,

given that this is a direct reply to another HN post, it might be useful to
have a "submit reply post" feature that shows this entry, indented, right
below the "Why the f*ck?" entry, just like in your email software or any
forum.

It wouldn't increase HN real estate occupation (still two slots out of 30), it
would be clear(er) what this is an answer to, although one can use links in
the comments. Plus, it would make sense to have comments for the two posts in
one page.

I know, easier said than done. Among the questions to be answered: what to do
when the first post should get off the first page and the reply shouldn't.

------
hkmurakami
Geography is certainly one of the "fucks", but there are most definitely other
factors as well: compensation, culture, quality of coworkers, etc.

~~~
Firehed
Let me guess - you're a male in your mid-twenties or maybe early thirties? (me
too!) Once you start having a family, kids, house, etc., you're going to be
far less inclined to bounce around the country or world for your job, even if
those factors you mention would mean a subjectively better job.

------
mvzink
Geography is an insufficient answer. I didn't realize there was confusion or
speculation, possibly even on the part of raganwald, over why most economic
activity is useless: obviously capitalism doesn't primarily select for
usefulness. The fact that somebody could read raganwald's "Why The Fuck?" post
and think there was some answer other than "capitalism" is beyond me.

------
subsystem
Google is in the top three for most desirable employment among economists,
engineers and lawyers (private sector) in Sweden. Google has less than 100
total employees in Sweden and most engineers in Sweden aren't even software
engineers. IKEA is also in the top three. Draw your own conclusions.

------
kyllo
After looking at your banner ad I can state that I'd be much more likely to
click if the yearly salaries of the jobs were listed.

If I were to create an employment marketplace site, I would definitely make it
mandatory for employers to list the salary range. Salary discussions come up
way too late in the hiring process if the employer doesn't state them up
front.

------
junto
Bad use of geography is equally bad. I have often complained that geographical
location does not directly relate to one's preferred language.

Since I am a native English speaker living in Germany, I still get Adsense ads
in German, regardless of my browser Accept Language headers.

