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Let People Move to Jobs (jefftk.com)
134 points by luu on Jan 19, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 302 comments



The whole idea of remote working to arbitrage cost of living falls apart if you are in any way social.

I think that a lot of people banging on about remote work just haven't tried it for an extended period. It works for some, and for those - great.

To me, it's just another step down the 'technification' of everything in which people don't speak to the people around them (because they've been 'removed' from their lives) but spend all of their time in front of screens.

I don't want to live in the middle of nowhere and earn 10x what the average local does. I want the people around me to be roughly on my level and share my interests. That's something that's easy to do in a city.

That's how businesses end up centering in hubs anyway. Who wants to be a startup founder living in the country alone? I'm sure this person exists, but they're the exception not the rule.

I mean, right now, you can look at a place like London and see hyperlocal clustering of wealth, one street will be the 'nice street' and the next one rough. People really care about this.

If you earned a London salary in my hometown you'd be ostracising yourself completely from those around you by virtue of just having none of the same concerns. Yeah, you own the home outright, you can buy a brand new car every 6 months, the price tags in the supermarket may as well be blank, etc. Oh yeah, and you have working hours whenever you want, booking a holiday is telling your boss "I won't be in Friday, guv". Wait until your neighbour tells you again how they're struggling to pay the bills or they've just been sanctioned by the benefits office.

I don't see how that benefits anyone.


> The whole idea of remote working to arbitrage cost of living falls apart if you are in any way social.

Unless you grew up in the area from which you work remotely, in which case you can be more social because connecting with old friends and family is much easier than making new friends at 30+.

> If I earned a London salary in my hometown I'd be ostracising myself completely from those around me [...] I don't see how that benefits anyone.

I don't see the problem with having more money than most of your neighbors - instead of buying new cars, you could spend it on your neighborhood and lift it up. Seems healthier than what is happening instead - non-techies being forced out of their homes because they can't keep up with techie rents.


Yeah, and all of those guys are skint and you're not. It works to an extent.

Perhaps you don't see the problem because you're theorizing about it rather than having lived experience. As I think most people do.

Imagine that essentially everyone you meet in your age group is far poorer than you are. Not most people but everyone. You need some sort of 'app' to find people to speak to who are on your level.

Your specific example means you're making yourself some sort of local pariah/celebrity/whatever. It's very nice and kind, but what about your peer group? Do they just exist through a webcam?

It's like the FIRE folks. Everyone thinks they want to retire at 30 unless they're in that situation, and then they realise it's deathly boring and everyone else is at work. (Sure, FU money is great).

On reflection, I think maybe you're talking about the small arbs where like, you move from somewhere with 500K homes to somewhere with 250K homes or whatever; i.e. from somewhere with jobs, to somewhere with jobs (that pay a bit less). If you're doing the big arb of moving to an economically depressed area then you have to actually live there.

The limiting example would be like those people that move to Vietnam or whatever and have servants. Maybe it works for them? But even if you're just moving to a poor area in the same country it's still a massive difference.

There is a fundamental difference between having a bit more money and deleting worldly concerns. The FIRE/low CoL idea forgets the idea that if you make yourself 'special' you are now indeed special and weird and not like those around you.


As someone who has actually managed to work remotely in a small city while employed by a major tech firm at normal pay rates, I can definitely say your scenario does not match my lived experience.

1) unless you move to a very small town, there are still plenty of people in your economic demographic. In the US, roughly 5% of households earn more than $200k. In a town of 70k, you’d expect there to be roughly 27k households and therefore 1300 households earning more than $200k. If you are currently making more then $500k you might be a little more out there, but then you really have no reason to move, do you? (Your techie peers at other companies don’t make that sort of money).

2) “Friends from work” don’t go away when working remotely. We still have “water cooler” conversations and members of my team have occasionally visited each other’s cities outside of work. We also do a ton of socializing when we are physically together for work.

That being said, it does reduce that aspect of social life. What fills it? Other activities- family/children, hobbies, causes, clubs, etc. I’ve lived in major tech hubs before- it did take longer to establish a social network while working remotely in my smaller city, but once established it has been much more fulfilling.

3) I apologize for criticizing, but your concern about not being able to socialize with the middle class sounds bizarre. Some of our dearest friends in this city are solidly middle class- 911 dispatchers, teachers, carpenters, nurses, and sales people. We met through sports, children’s school, and volunteering. We specifically chose to live well below our means (FIREing before the term existed I guess) so our neighbors are a varied lot, and we like them. We can’t invite them to join us vacationing in Europe, but other than that it’s there is little awkwardness.


> In the US, roughly 5% of households earn more than $200k. In a town of 70k, you’d expect there to be roughly 27k households and therefore 1300 households earning more than $200k.

This assumes uniform distribution of household incomes across cities of different sizes, which I suspect is a shaky assumption. More likely, the high earning households are concentrated in a short list of major population centers.


Not as much as you think. I couldn't quickly find the dataset where I looked at this before, but https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Household-Income has percentages of population earning more than $200k by state and MSA. The Birmingham Alabama metro area has 4.03% of its households earning more than $200k, and Alabama a whole has 2.92% of household earning more than $200k (the 5th lowest in the Union, btw). That means Alabama outside its biggest, richest city is still 2.5% over $200k. Sure, those are also probably concentrated in the other 2nd cities in the state like Montgomery and Tuscaloosa, but you are getting really far down the list of US Metro areas by population when you get to Tuscaloosa Alabama.

There are well off people throughout the United State, not only in the top 20 metros.


Even small towns have a decent number of high earning people, mainly small business owners.


> not being able to socialize with the middle class sounds bizarre.

These are your words, not mine!

If you're working remotely as a software developer then you're pretty much middle class by definition.


I think software devs, even remote probably make at least 100k, but I'm just guessing. That's a lot more than median us income of $46k (1) in 2019. Still not that far above dual income families. However they aren't paying as high a wages in rural areas as others pointed out so rural avg probably lower than big city avg.

1. https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/average-income-in...


"On your level" just screams pretentiousness. Since when is money the measure of a man anyways?


I'm not talking about some sort of scorecard but the fact that a lot of these low CoL areas have crushing poverty.

If you want to be the one-eyed man amongst the blind, go for it, but not everyone wants that.

Socioeconomic groupings exist in the metro areas too. Senior management hanging out with the workers is relatively rare. Because it's just a pain in the arse to guard yourself in every conversation and not seem like a twat lacking empathy when you talk about some benign thing you did last week.


I don't get it. I have lots of money. I've never had any feeling I had to 'guard' myself in any conversation with people from literally any social demographic. I mean, unless you're some kind of oddball, all you're using money for is buying nicer food, more space, and more time. So nobody's going to get upset because you're eating loads of avocados, even if it did come up in conversation.


He was not talking about you specifically.

If you have never experienced or observed stratification, then you may simply not get around much (in terms of social circles). It's not that strange, I cannot afford it either, I just made some chance acquintances, mostly through my socially far more capabele partner.

Class had become the most useful criterion to distinguish groups to me. It's not about guarding oneself explicitly, or avoiding interaction, but more in happening to frequent different kinds of sports/events, having different types of interest and being able to afford those types of hobbies. You won't see a working class person drive up to the club in his jaguar old timer for a game of golf and going for a Michelin star afterwards with friends, talking over a new investment opportunity. You see what I mean?


I come from the UK, which is pretty strongly stratified in terms of class (to my knowledge, the most stratified, at least historically). My observation was that, as long as you're straightforward and pleasant, people from all backgrounds are unlikely to dislike you if you come from a 'higher' social class. They'll have lots of ideas about who you are or what you're like, but they are mostly positive.

People from richer social classes, on the other hand, typically either dislike poorer classes for a variety of more or less obvious prejudices, or they dislike them because they project their own antagonisms, and thus feel disliked, then become disliked because they act 'guarded'.

My general basis for friendship is common interests and interpersonal chemistry. I think if people assume they have no common interests with people from different backgrounds, or they sabotage interpersonal chemistry by acting guarded, then they're cheating themselves.

Michelin star food is generally not all that much better than other food, golf is no different to mini-golf (aside from being less eco-friendly and less fun), and a jaguar old timer is just a particularly unreliable, unsafe and low mile-per-gallon Honda. Personally, I don't have much in common with people who define themselves by their career success, whether that's shown by fancy sneakers, or fancy cars.


The point is not whether or not the differences are meaningful, the point is the differences exist, and are reinforced by self-selection, conscious or not. Parallel culture if you will. You are right, it doesn't have to be hard to cross the boundaries, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.


My point is the differences are backwards. People think that they're disliked by others, but they're actually projecting their own dislike of others. This happens in hierarchical societies because the people at the top necessarily owe their position to the suppression of the people at the bottom, but since they like to think of themselves as nice fellows, they tend to push all of the emotions this entails onto the people they mistreat. So behind many of these stories of boundaries, there's usually somebody from a wealthy background acting like an asshole to some poor sod, all the while thinking they're just struggling with cultural differences.


People hating avocado toast eating wealthy millennials is a real thing.


No, it's a fake thing created by corporate crony politicians to misdirect public attention away from their crimes.


It's not really the money, it's the level of education and ambition. I worked remotely from Mount Pleasant, Michigan for a year and had a difficult time finding anyone to talk with about things that were interesting to me. The only group on Meetups.com was "Housewives of Mount Pleasant."

Friends are peers that have similar life experiences and values (and humor). Sometimes people like that are hard to find.


IMO when you work remote you can work from a small town OR you can move to other places if you like. For many moving is not an option because the rest of their family is in a place. There are other options other than Mount Pleasant, Michigan and the Bay area


> Friends are peers that have similar life experiences and values (and humor)

This is an pretty narrow definition of friendship.


If you have a better definition, I'd like to hear it. I don't have many friends, so my definition encompasses all of them. Maybe if I had a better definition, I'd be able to make more friends.


I'd open up your definition:

anybody instead of peers

some shared experiences or some shared values and forget about humour.

FWIW, I'm probably not qualified as I probably have more activity partners, or context friends, than true friends but your definition seemed incredibly limiting.


A friend is somebody you know whose company you enjoy. Depending on context, it does not include members of your family.


Sounds like you were looking for more of a college town vibe. Austin, Athens, Madison, etc.


I'm currently in a similar situation: I'm working from a MCOL area and remote from the home office. I don't love the city, but it's a nice city for other people. (I am here because of my academic spouse - he wasn't offered a job in a technical hub.)

We end up saving amazing amounts of money, relatively speaking, but our social life has been difficult to fill in. College vibe helps, but there are vast benefits to large cities and I'm certainly missing those.


Or Ann Arbor or East Lansing


Doesn't a normal job restricts you more since you are tied down to your employer's area?

In a remote job, you could be travelling and be more social, engaging with different people every month. A digital nomad.


> engaging with different people every month

That's exactly what I'm railing against. Most people who have done this eventually recognise that it does not make them happy.

It certainly did for me. Permanent connections with imperfect people are better than some sort of forever quest.


Yeah sure and that's where you decide to have one settlement spot where you can spend few months every year.

I am only pointing out that you are restricting yourself by not choosing remote work. Some people can't self restrict or enact behaviours required for it to work. I can still choose to settle on one place forever.


> all those guys are skint and you aren't

British slang for poor, has no money, I just learned.


All it would take is the teller at the local bank telling her BFF that you're one of the richest people in the county (which she shouldn't, but she did), and suddenly you're being hit up by every hard-luck case for miles around. You'd be their lottery winner next door.

edit Not to mention the target of every drug user and petty criminal.


Even with a great tech salary, your wealth is NOT noteworthy at the local bank.

The amount of ego in this thread is impressive!


Seriously, tech has got to have some of the most inflated egos on the planet. Do people in this thread really think there aren't plenty of other people making 150-200+ outside of the major tech hubs? Do they really think they are going to be Mr. Monopoly Man because they have a 150k remote job in Des Moines?


The OP's scenario is over the top, but if you had a 150k USD remote job in my hometown you could buy half a street. You would have a very different life to those around you and it would be challenging socially as a result.

I fail to see what this has to do with ego - it's not an assertion of superiority, it's just a factual statement. It's nothing to do with technology - working as a lawyer for remote clients would be the same.

If anything it's the opposite I would think. Ego would be rocking up and flashing the cash.


Your hometown street is one data point. There's a huge spectrum to choose from between that and Bay area/London. This feels like a false dichotomy.


Don't insult entire field based on your interpretation (perhaps justified, perhaps not) of few comments here.


Being in tech myself I will critique the culture of the industry as I see fit.


Remote work is international. I know a couple of great engineers who earn $150-200k remotely while living in the area where $3600 is considered a decent salary. That's $3600 annually, as in $300 monthly.


150k in Des Moines doesn’t go as far as you’d think, the top income tax in Iowa is 8.9%.


This is a cartoon-like scenario you have cooked up. You really think random people are going to be contacting you for money because of your mid-rate tech salary?

Absolutely hilarious.


Perhaps you never lived in a poor southern town, I saw this happen. I supposed it's universal.


I think this depends a lot on whether your hometown is in rural Iowa or rural India. Some people here come from very poor areas, where $300k can be 100x what others are making instead of 10x.


> I don't want to live in the middle of nowhere and earn 10x what the average local does. I want the people around me to be roughly on my level and share my interests.

You're clearly not a camper or a bow hunter, and you clearly have no particular attraction to pickup trucks.

Point being, your generalization is actually pretty specific to your set of interests. Other folks couldn't imagine not owning a car, getting rid of their dogs, or having to plan a special trip to go fishing.


Very insightful. I grew up in upstate California and you've pretty well described my kin. I would love to leave the city and move some place similar but to do so would drastically limit my options of employment. The irony is I work in a satellite office where I'm one of 3 on a 20 person team whose located at the company's HQ. My job would be no different if I were physically located some place else.


That's been my experience as well. I've worked remote for a few years and love it because I'm fine without the social aspect of work, but most of the people I know left their remote job in under a year because it felt lonely and isolating. Anecdotally, it seems like married people and homeowners tend to like remote work because they have extra free time and a spouse to talk to, whereas the single people I know would quickly start doing their remote work at Starbucks or pubs with free WiFi because it's the only way they'll see another person during the work week.


As a married dude with three kids I love the fact I can drop them off at school and wait for the at the bus stop and do all the dad things most dads miss out on. It helps my company is 100% remote so our culture supports it. Honestly they could give me a pay cut come raise time and I would still stay.


> The whole idea of remote working to arbitrage cost of living falls apart if you are in any way social. [...] I don't want to live in the middle of nowhere and earn 10x what the average local does. I want the people around me to be roughly on my level and share my interests.

I don’t really prefer to make all of my friends within the tech/academic bubble that I work in. I would feel weird if I didn’t see my coworkers, but I’ve made a point of finding activities that bring me into contact with a range of different people, and I think that makes my social life more interesting.

I was lucky enough to choose a career (medical physics) that takes place everywhere, but I could see remote work being effective for people in other fields.


I agree and feel the same, but there are limits somewhere.

Prince Harry isn't seriously going to go down the pub for regular meet ups with his friends from the ex mining town. They might get on if they have a chat, but that's not the point.

I'm specifically referring to the big CoL arbs, not the situation in which someone just lives like, further out from a major metro because they don't have to commute.


I think you’re using extremes to support your argument, but it falls apart when the “arbitrage” is even slightly less immense.

I moved from the Bay Area where my 1300sqft rental house would have cost me $1.2M, to work remote from a high-income community in Michigan where my 5000sqft house cost me $700k.

My neighbors are not poor, the schools are great, people are in a wide variety of professional and educational backgrounds (not just tech), and best of all, I live minutes away from my family and several of my best childhood friends, who I see every week.

You don’t need to move to the middle of nowhere for remote work to be a good idea, just anywhere even slightly more sane than the Bay Area. There’s loads of places all over the country that can strike a good balance here.


Completely agree with you here. I think I should have been more clear in the original post as a whole bunch of commenters seem to be talking about situations in which you _could_ have got a local job, it'd just be a bit less well paid.

I'm talking about working remotely to escape a locally depressed job market which is very different (because in that situation you are relatively unique).


You can work remotely for competitive wages and live in a major city... which is what I do. So no sacrifice of social capital.

More employers should embrace tools that let their workers work fully remote. It's started creeping in with more work from home days at most white-collar employers. But you'll have to start judging people by their productivity, not presence in the office. Video chat on demand is just as good (arguably more communication imo, as people no longer have to get up and walk to talk to you).


I agree. In my first sentence I'm specifically referring to the big cost of living arbs.


So much wrong with this comment:

Remote work doesn't mean home office. You can rent part of a shared office and still have colleagues for lunch.

You don't need to move to a place where you will be 'the rich guy'. It's your choice. Even with your big tech salary you won't be better off than the local business owners in a place with around 20k inhabitants.


> Even with your big tech salary you won't be better off than the local business owners

Exactly! But you're not a local business owner.


How much do you local business owners profit on average?


The average isn't relevant to my point. But in every town you'll find doctors, lawyers etc. who have a healthy social life despite their high income.


You don’t have to be that remote.. you could work in another city or even in a cheaper suburb. With video conferencing I think some of the social parts are maintained.


In the UK that's not "that remote". There are 5x, 10x house price differentials for driving 3-4 hours up the road.

Because no-one wants to live in a depressed town.

You can live in a commuter town and not commute, sure, then you're not arbitraging CoL (it won't be much cheaper).

If you live somewhere where there are no jobs then you have to deal with all of the issues I've stated.


Get out into the country proper, and you'll find plenty of rich people to hang out with.

They don't tend to live in villages or towns, and they don't socialise with "townies", and they certainly won't share any interests with some nouveau-rich tech worker who thinks they're wealthy


Sure, but then you're not taking advantage of cost of living differences (first line of my post).

You seem to have this idea that everyone here thinks they're uber wealthy or whatever. It's just relative to the locale. If you move to a depressed northern town with the idea that it's going to be some utopian bliss in your massive house then you are in for a shock. That's what is being discussed.

Obviously there are nice places outside of metro areas. They have a price tag to match, or not, the land isn't for sale.

You're also illustrating the other side of it - it's not easy to slot into a different social class (upwards or downwards).


I've lived all over the UK. I think Cardiff was the hardest to "slot into" - an English accent in Wales can prompt some interesting interactions ;) Though small-town England is also a nightmare of "if you didn't grow up here, fuck off".

Social class in the UK is all about where you were educated, it has nothing to do with your income (same for Australia, but apparently not the USA, though I think that's changing). Your accent, your manners, whether you call it "dinner" or "tea", whether you go to the toilet, the lavatory or the bathroom. If you actually care about social class, these are the things that matter. Income doesn't.

But attitude is the big one. You can fit in and make friends anywhere with an open attitude. People are people. Friendships can easily overcome class and income differences if there's mutual respect, empathy, and a desire to be friends.


In the US at least, that’s a false dichotomy.

The US Midwest and South have a dozen relatively cheap cities to live in where it isn’t depressed.

Housing supply/demand balance is a prime contributor to CoL, and the south/Midwest generally doesn’t have the draconian housing restrictions that the coastal cities have.


As someone currently having moved from the southwest, to bay area, to northeast, and now living in the south, you underestimate the cultural changes. I have relatively little in common with people who grew up here. They're fine people, but they're not people who I can talk to past small talk.

And in a fair number of these places, there's the same hostility to people moving in as the bay area.


You seem to have no friends/family or attachment to a particular social circle; which makes the physical connections with your co-workers valuable. If you have a very active social circle, you won't probably care that much about joining your co-workers for an after-work.

The point of remote work is that you don't need to move to Silicon Valley to get a good job. And unless you are living in the middle of no-where, small communities still have very wealthy people who are probably wealthier than you'll ever become. Why didn't they move? Because they have roots there.

Living in relatively poor/clean community is and co-working is still a good thing. You can then afford to have a family, something most people don't and you'll be able to buy more services. Then, you are helping the locals out there and reducing inequality.


> I don't see how that benefits anyone

Putting London money into a poorer economy that really needs it, rather than back into London, which doesn't?


> I don't see how that benefits anyone.

It benefits parasitic rentiers.


> I don't see how that benefits anyone.

It benefits the local community because you and others who do the same will spend your money there. I can't believe this isn't obvious.


This argument has been made for decades.

Isn't it about time we realised that people live somewhere amongst social capital they have built up throughout their lives.

And therefore business capital should move where the people are - to avoid damaging that social capital. Not the other way around.

Ultimately people work to live. Those who live to work are a tiny minority.

With modern technology there is little excuse. Fewer and fewer enterprises require physical concentration to operate.


Jobs and companies are rather ephemeral, migration is disruptive of community and family, and demands not just housing but also infrastructure (roads, transit, sewers, power, schools, health). We should understand the value of community and family and moderate the need for migration and make careful use of existing infrastructure.

The North of England and cites like Pittsburgh and Detroit are cases in point.


Once upon a time, a rising tide of economic progress would lift all boats in all communities all around the country.

Nowadays, we're in a bizarre reality where a 200% productivity gain among the average worker nationwide means a 1500% productivity gain in the top 10% of counties, coupled with a 55% productivity loss in the bottom 90% of counties. (Numbers generated randomly for illustrative purposes).

One would expect that productivity-boosting technology such as computers, robots, cell phones, and various forms of automation would increase productivity for nearly every person on every square inch of this planet. That is no longer the case, and it is something I plan to study in depth at a later date.


> Once upon a time, a rising tide of economic progress would lift all boats in all communities all around the country.

I think this hasn't been true for centuries. Moving rural to the cities has been documented since the 1700's very clearly by economists.


It may be true that all boats were being lifted before, but some more than others. Or at least the gap between the boats wasn’t as big as it is now.


I think the Communist Manifesto was written precisely because not all boats were being lifted.


Yes, able to identify some of the problems, but not a solution.


Those would be really interesting statistics to know, anyone know where we could get actual numbers?

Also be interesting to know his much is due yu concentration of professions and how much to local network effects.


I agree with your assessment and the irony with respect to this topic is a big contributor to the current state of things in places like the Rust Belt is what other's have said is not feasible; jobs moving to the people. If all that manufacturing can move to China why can't FAANG move to Toledo?


Because most people who want to work at FAANG don't want to live in Toledo, and it's a lot harder to find competent software developers than factory workers. Not that there aren't competent devs in Toledo, but the supply would be dried up pretty quick, and good luck convincing rich, coastal, Elizabeth-Warren-beat-Hillary-in-my-district Californians to move to an area with lake-effect snow in a state that just passed a heartbeat law for abortions.

Obviously painting with broad strokes, but FAANG companies would have to fundamentally rethink the kind of person they'd like to hire if they want to move out of affluent Urban cores.


> but FAANG companies would have to fundamentally rethink the kind of person they'd like to hire if they want to move out of affluent Urban cores.

And yet Apple seemed to have figured out this type of problem quite nicely during the 80's and 90's when they moved their manufacturing from places like Carleton TX, Elk Grove CA and Fountain CO to places like Singapore and Ireland.


Once again, manufacturing. Not design. You can teach anyone with a high school education (even less, see 3rd world factories) how to solder or how to operate machinery efficiently. VLSI, circuit design, operating system development, FPGAs, even app development requires years of specialized training just to be competent at the fundamentals, usually taking the form of a degree. So if you want to hire designers with minimal costs you go to where the largest relevant talent pool already lives, and it ain't Toledo. It's MIT, Stanford and similar places.

It's the same reason any company prefers to hire local when they can. Much easier to entice someone to drive somewhere else in town in the morning than to entice someone to uproot their life and move 1000 miles.


So I guess you don't buy into "just learn to code"?


Haha, yeah it's the "just" part that's the issue. In all seriousness I'm actually helping my wife learn to code at the moment. Her last job was as a pharmacy tech, but she hated that job and isn't satisfied with me as the sole breadwinner. She hadn't even touched the command line until a couple of years ago. She's come a long way from zero and is now learning React, but it'll still be at least another year, maybe two before I'd say she's ready to produce something professional-quality on a professional schedule. And that's with me taking care of the bills, funding the educational resources she's using (not a 4-year degree), doing a LOT of tutoring in the first year and and passing along insights I didn't get until my first job. And she's put a minimum of 30 hours a week into it, often more.

I can only imagine what someone with greater responsibilities, less time and no mentoring would go through. Not saying it can't be done, clearly it has. But just because a few talented/lucky/insane people can start from nothing and strike it big doesn't make it accessible to the average coal miner. If it did our salaries would be a low lower.


Yeah, the notion we were just going to make all those folks who work with their hands into web devs was doomed to failure from the get go.


Problem is that "business capital" is also the same as "social capital". Rich people have influence because they hang out with other rich people.

If you want to have startup you have to hang out with rich people so they invest in it or they buy your services. You don't want to have your company 10 hours or more away from customers.

It can argued that it does not matter as much for Google, but if you are a product owner of a "FizzBuzz maker", you need social capital with high ranking people in organization so they don't cut your budget. In the end it works the same, that you have to play golf with the right people so they trust you and don't cut your funding.

Of course, it is not enough just to hang out with right people. Don't get me wrong, because hanging out with people will validate all skills so if person doesn't deliver no one is going to hang out with such person.

There was an article on HN not long ago with a line "Talent is distributed equally. Opportunity is not.", because social capital in big cities is much more valuable than in country side. In terms of money, in terms of no one is going to talk to you, in big city you can find new friends easier.


This - and to add to that, the high value of this social capital when you have lower financal capital.

Someone to help with the kids, relax with, help you fix your car, have a cheap evening or weekend of hanging out with. When you move it can take years to build all that up again. You might be able to do without it all, but you either have to pay to replace it or go without.


But that implies we should centralize in cities, so people don't have to move if they lose their jobs. Getting a few companies to a small town just means that when one fails, workers are more likely to have to move at a later stage in life, when they already have kids and a mortgage and such. Better for them to move to a hub when they're young. Plus their children will already be born in a hub, so they won't have to move at all.


I'm not arguing in either direction, just pointing out that moving can have a high cost. I've moved a lot, but I'm lucky to have been largely about to afford to pay for support when I've not yet been able to build support networks.


I agree with what you said but how many people can afford to have families in hubs like you assume?


(author)

The main reason it's expensive is because supply restrictions have pushed housing far above the cost of construction. We could fix this by allowing more construction, which is what I'm arguing for in the post.


> Isn't it about time we realised that people live somewhere amongst social capital they have built up throughout their lives.

It's often the case, but SF, NYC, London are very popular outliers, so why can't other regions be?

It's not social capital, it's expected quality of life that makes people move to NYC for work and makes dilapidated areas unattractive.


> ...it's expected quality of life that makes people move to NYC for work and makes dilapidated areas unattractive.

I can't speak to Britain, but in the U.S. there are more people that do not live in SF or NYC than do. Other than people with niche interests (musical theater, startups, finance), most Americans, even young adults, aren't sitting around wondering how they can swing a big move to New York City.

It's much more normal to move to a regional big city, but in those cases the jobs are likely outside the city center as downtown. It's worth noting that NY and California would be stagnating if it weren't for immigration. Immigrants seem to be the ones who see places like SF and NYC as their big chance for a new quality of life.


I'm not sure about that, take a look at any of the who's hiring threads and note how nearly all the UK jobs are in London.


Yes because London is best for the Founders, VC, Investors, Board of Directors and C level executives. Not because it is best for employees.


> With modern technology there is little excuse. Fewer and fewer enterprises require physical concentration to operate.

True, but they're still a small minority of jobs; and those people will need/want services provided by workers of professions that do require physical presence, who will have an incentive to move away to big cities. So the only way to sustain that is to have a group of extremely highly paid remote workers, who can pay a premium to keep those other service workers in the area. Meanwhile, everyone who doesn't have a customer service job nor a remote one will move away, so you're left with a bifurcated pool of workers. Doesn't really sound like a great community to me.

The alternative is for remote workers to live mostly isolated from non-remote workers, but I can't see that spreading beyond a few exceptions.

EDIT: Now that I think of it, we already have those bifurcated communities, in the form of areas to where people with money move after retiring (which also frees them from the physical part of the job). I guess they're reasonably popular.


>Isn't it about time we realised that people live somewhere amongst social capital they have built up throughout their lives.

This is situational. There are also people who for whatever reason (usually work for parents) have moved around throughout their early years, thus they have little social capital to fall back on once they reach adulthood. In their case, moving to where the opportunity is makes a lot of sense because that's what they grew up with.

I do agree with you, though, that a lot of jobs are location-bound that needn't necessarily be, although there is a management overhead in incorporating remote workers. I hope as time goes by more managers will learn how to work with remote staff and that opportunity will become more widely available.


I'd argue that the average person lives in order to work. It is ingrained in our minds from an early age, and why we have not gone down to a 15 hour week that was first proposed as the path ahead by Keynes in 1930.

In the FIRE community you would find that the majority of people are working in order to live.

Most people with consumer debt are trapped in this too.


Technology doesn't seem to be (in terms of what people can cheaply get hold of) there yet though? Amd as soon as it does get there, you'd arbitrage to third world guys not Western guys who want to live in Thaliand.

We're in a situation where we have offshore (Indian) tech hires and it's hard to coordinate on technical matters, even in a company where we have unlimited access to fancy VC rooms. When we flew them over for a bit everything was far easier. My boss thinks expensive digital whiteboards would make a big difference, but actually more than the money there's a political/social cost to buying big, visible things to sit in public sight in an office.

So why would you hire a Western guy for 3x the price and pay the exact same communication cost? Western and sitting in the same building or 3rd world country no other option seems to make sense.


Unfortunately a lot of jobs do require presence in the office, especially in particular sectors where the perception of increased security working in the office is misleading.

I hope more and more companies move to remote working, but it's still a hard concept


The author made a blind guess that 80% of Google would quit If they moved HQ without any actual evidence.

If Google opened up a new large office in a place like Kansas City with no salary cut and a strong internet presence and some other tech companies (ICE exchange for example), I bet enough Google employees would want to move there to make it worthwhile. Cheaper cost of living, better schools, better for families etc. plus alternatives If you get tired of working at Google but probably not since your lifestyle would be so much better than the Bay Area.

I know a lot of people that are very sick of the Bay Area, especially those with kids.


As a counterpoint, in the leadup and when Amazon announced their HQ2 in Northern Virginia, one thing they were very clear about is that no teams and no employees except some execs were going to actually get reassigned to the new location. All staffing at the new location would be via new hires at the new location. They knew full well that if they tried to move a team, most of the members of the team would transfer to a team that wasn't relocating, and that if they tried to prevent that the employees would just quit.


Relevant story from Peopleware (Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister):

One thing Townsend seems to have missed entirely is the presence of women in the workforce. The typical person being moved today is part of a two-career family. The other half of that equation is probably not being moved, so the corporate move comes down hard on the couple’s relationship at a very delicate point. It brings intolerable stress to bear on the accommodation they’re both striving to achieve to allow two full-fledged careers. That’s hitting below the belt. Modern couples won’t put up with it and they won’t forgive it. The company move might have been possible in the 1950s and 1960s. Today it is folly.

Even in the sixties, organizational moves didn’t make much sense. A case in point is the decision by AT&T’s Bell Laboratories to move the 600-person ESS project from New Jersey to Illinois in 1966.

[...]

Years after the ESS cutover, I arranged to interview Ray Ketehledge, who had run the project. I was writing some essays on management of large efforts, and ESS certainly qualified. I asked him what he saw as his main successes and failures as boss. "Forget the successes," he said. “The failure was that move. You can't believe what it cost us in turnover." He went on to give some figures. The immediately calculable cost of the move was the number of people who quit before relocation day. Expressed as a percentage of those moved, this initial turnover was greater than the French losses in the trenches of World War I.

[...]

And that accounts only for the initial loss. In the case of Bell Labs, there was another large exodus starting about a year after the move. These were the people who had honestly tried to go along with the company. They moved and, when they didn’t like the new location, they moved again.


Counter-counterpoint, Toyota consolidated several offices in CA/KY/NY to one HQ to Plano, TX and brought about 2800 out of 4000 employees. It was a big disrupter to local housing prices, with massive swaths of land experiencing the maximum-by-law 10%-yearly property tax increases.

(Source: https://www.dallasnews.com/business/local-companies/2018/07/...)

I don't know if there's any easy generalizations to suss out. Probably every case will be very specific to the work being done, the environment it's done in, and the people it's done by.


> They knew full well...

How? Short of some background, this could easily be a massive assumption.


I have seen multiple teams move location within one corporation. Most of the time no one moves.


Would be great for Googlers ... kinda horrible for locals in KC who would still be making the same amount, and housing costs skyrocket.... funding sudden needed school expansions ... and so on...

The economic and political messes of sudden expansion can be an absolute mess.


The only reason this happens is because of (perhaps misguided) attempts to resist the changes caused by population growth from local voters. If it was up to the market to decide, what would happen if there was a sudden spike in the demand for housing? Developers would build more housing. Prices might move a bit, but you’re not going to be looking at a crisis. However, entrenched homeowners don’t want that, because it would change whatever it is they like about their nice quite neighbourhoods. So they resist any attempt to develop new housing. Housing supply is artificially constrained, everybody’s property taxes go up (because the supply of property tax payers is artificially constrained too), prices skyrocket, and access to housing plummets.

The idea that when you buy a house, that you’re somehow paying for your neighbourhood/city to perpetually remain in a state that personally satisfies you is behind most of our housing problems. Enabled by the almost universal dysfunctionality of local democracy.


Isn't that an example of functional local democracy? Why bother make your town a mess in the name of growth.

In SF's case the external pressure just was to huge and they should have given up long time ago keeping it a low built city.


> Why bother make your town a mess in the name of growth.

Yeah, and why bother making the country a mess by letting foreigners into your country?

People moving for opportunity is a fundamental part of what America is. To deny others opportunities that you have by virtue of birthplace is nativism, and it's ugly.

Sure, it sounds relatively harmless when it's "just your town", but you can look at the bay area and see what happens when everyone behaves this way for their neighborhood or city. Massive rents, struggling families, hideously long commutes: all the result of NIMBYism.


> Yeah, and why bother making the country a mess by letting foreigners into your country?

I mean, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? And unless you’re a proponent for open borders, you advocate a similar position - just a different scale. I’m also not really a fan of the “deny others opportunities” grandstanding. I mean you do it right now. I bet someone wants the job you have. Why not give your money away so others have opportunities? It’s easy to talk the talk with that. We all, by nature of our global system, deny others opportunities. The Swiss deny me an opportunity to move to Switzerland since I don’t have a million bucks. New Zealand requires me to invest half a million. Canada has a points system for immigration.

> People moving for opportunity is a fundamental part of what America is. To deny others opportunities that you have by virtue of birthplace is nativism, and it's ugly.

Well, like towns, you shouldn’t expect the idea of America to not change. There is like 350mm people here. Personally I think that’s plenty and the Statue of Liberty mindset just reminds me of 2nd Amendment arguments. I don’t want to end up like India, China, or Bangladesh with crowds and crowds of people (whether they are here due to immigration or birth). I think the US is overpopulated as it is. My idea of America is a lot of untamed wilderness, clean air, national parks, peace and quiet. Increases on population don’t really fit my vision (but that’s mine).

> Massive rents, struggling families, hideously long commutes: all the result of NIMBYism.

And this isn’t solved by building skyscrapers and having more people. It’s solved by having fewer people and jobs less concentrated in specific areas.

PG talks about taboo topics. Population is one of those I think, for me. I feel uncomfortable saying anything about it publicly, and I feel as though people have largely been indoctrinated that growth=good and you shouldn’t challenge that. I really just don’t see the value in adding more and more people to the US (birth or immigration). If we could have fewer, better educated people and less wealth disparity this could be an even better place to live. Imagine getting rid of jobs that people don’t want to do and then paying people a lot more money to do jobs they do want to do? Pay a barista $100,000/year instead of two business analysts making $50,000. It’s not like we’re going to add enough jobs to keep up with the pace of growth, unless we add mind-numbing bullshit jobs or create another TSA.

But I think the whole raison d'être for everything here in this tiny post is that our economy is built on a growth model. It’s a huge Ponzi scheme (in function not intention), so if we don’t increase the population or increase global population and sell to them, the whole thing falls apart. But it’s also this growth mindset that’s destroying the pristine wilderness we have, causing global warming, and contributing to nonsense wars and terrorism.


> unless you’re a proponent for open borders

I don't know about TulliusCicero, but I agree with their comment and I think open borders would probably be good. The US's historically high levels of immigration have been very positive for the country and I think we could let more people in.

> My idea of America is a lot of untamed wilderness, clean air, national parks, peace and quiet

The US is enormous, and people who want to move here are primarily interested in living in the major cities. If we allow building dense cities we can easily continue to have very large fractions of the country set aside as wilderness.

> If we could have fewer, better educated people and less wealth disparity this could be an even better place to live.

You're only considering the interests of the people who already live here. Keeping people out doesn't make fewer people, just fewer people here, just like it doesn't decrease wealth disparity only wealth disparity here. Lots of people around the world would love to come here and have the same opportunities we have. I think we should generally let them.


> I don't know about TulliusCicero, but I agree with their comment and I think open borders would probably be good. The US's historically high levels of immigration have been very positive for the country and I think we could let more people in.

My take on that is that it’s a naive, anarchist position. I’m also unsure that anyone can anticipate the potential downsides as well. I see so many problems it’s hard to even get a start. And it’s not about not letting in “bad” people, but that infrastructure would be absolutely overwhelmed and it would be an unmitigated disaster. We wouldn’t have like a couple million more people moving in, it would be tens, maybe hundreds of millions. They all won’t fit in NYC and SF - they’ll move to Columbus, and Pittsburgh, and they’ll move to suburbs, and shanty towns. I just don’t see positives outweighing negatives unless we really just skyrocket prices - but on a macro level that’s no different than how things are.

To me it’s like putting your oxygen mask on before you help someone else. We can’t even solve problems in this country now. But I do imagine mega corps would love this since they’d have a much higher pool of workers, and an expanded market that is easier to get access to, which kind of gets back to my last point about growth-mindset.

> You're only considering the interests of the people who already live here. Keeping people out doesn't make fewer people, just fewer people here, just like it doesn't decrease wealth disparity only wealth disparity here. Lots of people around the world would love to come here and have the same opportunities we have. I think we should generally let them.

I appreciate your comment but I don’t think it’s a fair one. To start, I think GLOBAL population is far too high, and I’d apply the same principles to the US that I am suggesting but globally, but we were talking about the US. I also think that this is a case where it’s easy to say “oh but if they only had the opportunity” because it sounds great while also ignoring how it affects others. Generally I don’t think we should let people in to the US, because it doesn’t really solve any problems. It certainly doesn’t help the rest of the world. Am I lucky that I was born here? You bet. But that’s it. I’m also lucky to not be born with a disability, I’m also not lucky since I wasn’t born wealthy.

The last point I’ll add is that the vast majority of the world disagrees with open-borders and I think for good reason. Even the most liberal countries (broadly speaking) don’t do it.

Thanks for your discussion points here. I’d love to hear more of what you think - and I hope what I said doesn’t come off too poorly. It’s hard with text and not in-person.


If you want to have open borders then there’s really nothing standing in the way of implementing it. Except that you would need to abolish all government welfare. Otherwise you would have every person in the world who’s quality of life is worse than the quality of life afforded a US welfare recipient (which is billions of people) moving to the US. Which would naturally destroy the country.

Modern USA was created by migrants. But when the country was being settled, those migrants were faced with having to either provide for themselves, or die. The US has also seen a lot of growth from continuing to import immigrants. But those immigrants were all selected based upon a relatively strict criteria to evaluate whether they would be providing value to the country.


Participation and broader engagement in local elections is typically rather low, so when you have platforms that reinforce the communities problems prevailing in local elections, I’d generally consider that to be a failure.

> Why bother make your town a mess in the name of growth.

Local government elections don’t have any influence over population growth. The forces that influence that are beyond the control of local government (and to a lesser extent, beyond the control of government in general). If the local population increases, the only thing local government can control (in relation to housing) is what choice it makes between preserving character or prices. The typical NIMBY response to dealing with population growth is that it should happen elsewhere, because they like where they live, and don’t want it to change.


I don’t think people necessarily have the idea that they can keep things the same forever, but I do think it’s quite reasonable for local voters having a say, via the social and democratic processes established in their town, on potential changes to their town. It would seem unreasonable to me for that to not be the case.

That’s true on matters of zoning, schools, libraries, fire stations, or whatever other decisions the town faces. There’s a process for amending zoning rules; there’s usually a process for getting a variance from zoning rules that are unduly burdensome in regards to an individual parcel. What about this democratic process is dysfunctional, other than some people not liking the outcome?


If we invent some sort of technology that lets us increase the housing supply we may be able to avoid this issue.


From a technological standpoint housing supply is a solved problem. Three story multi-tenant buildings with underground parking and public transportation work great, if that's not enough just build higher.

Solving the political problem is much harder.


Carpentry?


Socialism.


That would be an economic or market structure, and may be a possible solution. I'm looking at LVT and land use regulation myself.

My initial quip was to point out that (as I suspect @anonymoushn was alluding) the problem isn't technological. Rather it's one of incentives, politics, and market structure.


Yes - agree. I am being provocative as well (HN doesn't like, but sometimes it's useful).

This is a problem of policy and social engineering - technology can and will help, but it won't solve it.


Lol, imagine thinking that the undersupply of housing in US metro is due to the market having too much say.


Lol, imagine thinking housing serving as a speculative asset for global Capital doesn’t constrain and distort supply away from what is needed vs what provides the greatest returns for this class of investors.


There are better ways of expressing this valid notion.


Google has heaps of offices around the world :

https://about.google/locations/?region=asia-pacific&office=s...

Does anyone know what proportion of their workforce is not in California?

A question to Googlers and those who have worked there, is it possible to move to say Boulder within Google easily?


If you're qualified to work for a team that's hiring, transfers are pretty easy. I work for GOOG outside CA and know a lot of coworkers who transferred teams within the company from out of state. Lateral mobility is something of a perk.


You have to make sure to join in the bay area though. Offers in my local office are typically for 1/11 the initial equity of offers for the same level in Mountain View, San Francisco, or Sunnyvale, and I was not permitted to speak to any hiring managers in the US after seeing a four-day exploding offer from my local office.


I'm surprised you received an exploding offer; I had thought that was something we didn't do?

Pay depends enormously on the local market for your skills. NYC and Boston pay almost as much as Mountain View, while (ex) London pays much less. People moving between offices are often offered large increases/decreases. A strategy of joining in Mountain View and then transferring to a lower-paying office isn't generally going to give you much higher pay at the new office (though you'll of course have the money you put away while in Mountain View).

(Speaking only for myself)


Working in Mountain View for 6 months is worth literally a million dollars of (MV initial equity - local office initial equity), assuming I was going to work in the local office for the remaining 3.5 years either way.


> Does anyone know what proportion of their workforce is not in California?

I think it's about half.

> is it possible to move to say Boulder within Google easily?

Reasonably. You need to find a team at the other office that has openings for someone with your skills, but I know many people who have done it (Mountain View -> Cambridge, NYC -> Seattle, Cambridge -> Pittsburgh, Mountain View -> Boulder among others).


Indeed a lot of long time Mountain View residents are unhappy to have Google HQ there. Sure their property values have skyrocketed, but for those who just want a nice place to live the quality of life is worse.


> kinda horrible for locals in KC who would still be making the same amount, and housing costs skyrocket

Surely the locals already have their houses in KC and would benefit more than they'd suffer, as renters, sellers, shop owners.


What if you have kids or grandkids who have to move away far.


The argument of this post is that we should build more housing so people don't get forced out.


As someone who has experienced this happen to my home city I can vouch. It does suck.


Which city?


Not the parent but Vancouver's become like that over the last 10 years or so. I lived just outside Vancouver and I watched the relatively quiet, affordable neighbourhood I lived in suddenly become filled with overpriced highrises and condos and watched rent more than double in price while average wages remained relatively stagnant.


Yeah that's nothing to do with big companies moving there. That's what happens when you let Chinese investors dominate your housing market.

(See Auckland as well)


I am from Vancouver. The house prices have always been ridiculous since the early 80s when my family moved there. Vancouver’s real estate market has always been unaffordable and the highest in Canada. This is nothing new in the last 10 years, it’s literally a 40 year old problem.


I left Vancouver almost 10 years ago. Rents were okay at the time but housing prices were already ridiculous and had been for a long time. I'm not surprised that rents moved up to be more in line with the cost of ownership.


It raises property values. Increases the tax base. For home owners might be a great time to sell.

It also raises prices which means local shops and places to eat would be booming.


They might have to sell if there are property taxes.

But if they're a local and not getting one of these high paying jobs ... they're going to have a hard time finding a place they can afford.


> ...housing costs skyrocket...

In the short term, sure, but there's plenty of room in KC.


Housing costs can be kept reasonable if in addition to a new HQ, the city also builds a housing for a few thousand additional people.


I think you might be underestimating how many people will see government housing as a massive downgrad


"The city builds" can just as easily mean "the city issues permits allowing".


The more interesting question might be what percent of senior employees would quit Google if ordered to move. I have no direct evidence, but my sense is potentially much higher than the average: they could care less about living costs, don't want to uproot their families, love CA weather, love living in such a tech heavy area, have access to better schools than in Kansas, etc.

FWIW, my old company added a Seattle office a few years ago. Sure, some people moved, but it was pretty negligible.


I think there's a real possibility that the new Google employees and their kids would "make" the schools in their Kansas town better, through a bunch of different mechanisms. I live in an excellent school district in the rural middle of nowhere, and it's 100% because of the large state university that happens to be here.


In the long term for sure, but for individual families considering to relocate they're looking at the short term. How long does it take to "make" the schools better, and how many of the ten or so years your child is in education before the level gets back to what they already have.


Kansas City already has a mix of great and terrible schools, like every metro area, segregated mostly by the cost of living in that particular district.

They'd probably just move to the wealthier suburbs or send kids to high quality private schools.

Longer term, having a solution for schools that doesn't create such radical disparities between districts mere miles apart would be in everyone's interest, but that's a broader national problem.


Any of your young and single googlers would probably decide to stay. California (in my experience) is a much more attractive place for 20-30 something’s than KC. They could most likely get a job with one of the many tech companies in the Bay.


(author)

I'm curious what your guess is? I'm not talking about opening a new satellite office in a cheaper area (they've already done this, for example Pittsburg) but actually moving their headquarters. Tens of thousands of roles moving from Mountain View / Sunnyvale to Kansas City.

Most of these roles are occupied by people who have a lot of options and don't want to move across the country. Even if they were up for moving and the company was offering to keep the same (far above market for KC) pay, they'd be very nervous about entering a situation where their employer would have so much more leverage over them.


I’m not sure either

(My totally blind guess would be about half of your guess, which would be plenty high enough for your point to still stand)

That said, corporate headquarters get moved frequently enough that this is probably a question that Google could and would model out were such a move actually under consideration.


With no salary cuts would be amazing. So long as the policy is transparent for new hires in the new market, you would only need to grandfather people those that make the move.

There are tons of places I’d move to easily if I could keep my current SF salary.


In discussing this with others I’ve found the same sentiment about moving if they can keep the same salary. But then I ask do they expect the inevitable next job after the current one to also offer the same salary? Unlikely. There are tons of great reasons to leave CA for jobs elsewhere, money shouldn’t be the reason.


Since your salary would go much further outside of SF, why would it be necessary to keep the same salary?


Because companies will reduce the salary until the net benefit is 0. You still want a small nudge/incentive to encourage people to move.


Does Google make the same profit regardless? Yup, I think it's necessary.


What does Google's profit have to do with your salary needs?


I feel like this thread is made of the kind of hard-line stances that lower the overall quality of HN. Both sides present a rhetorical question designed to paint the other side’s position as nonsensical, without engaging in any actual discussion.

Google’s profit clearly has to do with salary because salary is a negotiation between employees and employers, and “my work allows you to make $x more dollars than if I hadn’t done the work” is a basic tenet of salary negotiation.

But this is a negotiation. If Google moved to a lower cost-of-living location, they’d be making themselves available as an employer to new employees, for whom their current locations are undesirable. So if there are other potential employees who are willing to do the work for less salary, Google has the option to hire them instead.


> But this is a negotiation.

Sure. But negotiating for a piece of the action comes in the form of deciding on stock options and grants. Salaries don't go up and down with profits.


> Salaries don't go up and down with profits.

It objectively the case that salaries vary with profits. Are you just saying you think they ought not?

If the company is losing money, you can bet raises will be harder to come by. When Facebook was poaching a lot of Googlers in the late aughts and early teens, base salaries went up a bunch to make the job more competitive. But if Google hadn't been profitable there would have been no headroom to make that change. Those are two (of many) ways that salaries vary with profits.


> It objectively the case that salaries vary with profits.

Salaries are a function of the perceived value of the particular employee to the company. If the salary is too low, he'll be poached by another company. If it's too high, he's likely to be laid off or otherwise pushed out.

For example, if an employee contributes $100 in value to the company, his ideal compensation would be $100 minus the opportunity cost of the money, which is about $15.

This has nothing to do with the profit of the company as a whole.

It is true that companies often have a lot of difficulty computing what the actual dollar value of a particular employee is, but there is no doubt that the company will do badly if it gets it too far wrong too many times.

Companies falling on hard times that try to cut salaries across the board (or limit raises, same thing) do so at great peril - the underpaid (relative to their contribution) employees leave and the overpaid stay. I.e. this can result in a vicious death spiral. A much harder, but far more effective strategy is to identify the overpaid ones and get rid of them.


Salaries do go down with profits, a long enough run of low profits and salaries go to zero.


Neither the salary needs nor the profit margins really influence Google salaries. Employees are paid salaries based on the margin at the market.


As Publilius Syrus put it, "everything is worth what it's purchaser will pay." Why should google be willing to pay less for continued labor after relocating if profits are unaffected? And if they're not, why would anyone keep working there?


He neglected to include the selling side. "Everything is worth what it's seller will sell it for." And that in turn is often going to be dictated by what other offers are on the market for the same good. This is a big problem for sellers of software labor in Kansas City.

The problem for the hypothetical KC Googler is that there are substantially no other high paying tech jobs in KC. There's Cerner, but they pay seniors ~1/3rd what Google pays (and it seems to get further from Google comp as you go up the ladder). So if you want to negotiate with Google to increase your pay, you have no credible best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). If you want to work for any other high paying tech company, you have to leave town. Google, knowing they are the best game in town, would face less upward pressure on wages.

I mean, as a matter of simple fact, Google does not pay the same in different metros. Nor do any other large companies I'm aware of. The pay is adjusted to what is required to attract talent in those metros.


This is right: they and the rest of the FAANGs pay based on the local market.

On the other hand this means areas with lower costs of living but strong tech job markets can be a very good deal: Pittsburg is one people often bring up.

Boston isn't as cheap as Pittsburg, but it's far cheaper than the Bay Area with pay that's nearly as high. I'm very happy here.


If your money goes 2x further after the move, then you might be much better off even with a salary reduction. This means a move could be a win for both google and the employee.

Also, pegging your salary to corporate profits has its downsides. At Boeing, a good chunk of the worker bees negotiated their bonuses to be pegged to the quarterly profits. They were pretty unhappy about this when the 737MAX problems tanked profits, and the bonuses vanished.


I think profit sharing is totally awesome in all forms and losing bonuses when your business kills people is more than reasonable.

But anyway to me the math isn't about win/win but just supply and demand. If they can afford to pay it and were willing to before, it's not like you can't make the same amount (if not more) and have better future prospects without the stress and cost of moving.

I think a more realistic take would be a more decentralized approach to labor in general and allow many smaller satellites to pop up (which they already have) in many places and allow their people to move freely with minor salary adjustments. That way the costs and benefits even out in the long run, mass relocation to a single location probably isn't great for anyone involved long term.


Supply & demand is exactly about win/win. People don't wittingly make deals where they are worse off than if they decline the deal.


> They were pretty unhappy about this when the 737MAX problems tanked profits, and the bonuses vanished.

I have no doubt, likely more unhappy at lost bonuses than the fact they contributed directly to many lives being lost.


Why does where I love have to do with my salary? Google makes the same profit off me regardless, so I want my share.



Yeah I don't see the connection there either. I think an equivalent salary adjusted for cost of living with maybe an extra 10% to show good faith would be plenty.

People with the 150k-300k salaries FAANG provides would be making a surgeon's salary in Kansas City.


In fact, Google has a Pittsburgh office which is doing quite well as far as I can tell.


The fact that that office exists was a major reason I was able to consider them as an employer. I'd already looked at SF / NYC as options and basically priced myself out because I'd be moving with my family, and I wanted a house / decent commute / to not have roommates.

(Admittedly, when I was looking at SF / Silicon Valley before, I was looking at startups; having a Big N as an employer might have just made it work, but we'd still have been losing out on closer family ties.)


Google actually has good-sized, growing offices in a number of major US cities these days. SF and NYC are huge, but there are plenty of other options: Seattle, Boulder, Austin, Pittsburgh, LA, Irvine, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Cambridge, etc.

I also have a family and have no interest in ever living in Silicon Valley or New York. I'm at Google and absolutely love being in Seattle.



FWIW as a Pittsburgh Googler, I haven't experienced the air issues personally. That said, I don't live near the office. It seems like the issues are a lot more obvious to those who live near Bakery Square.


Why would your lifestyle be better in KC than SF? With kids I'd expect it to be more manageable in terms of costs, but while I like KC, I struggle to see how it would be better


Housing isn't a struggle. Because of that, commuting and good schooling aren't as big of struggles. Hobbies and outside-work activities are generally easier to support for similar reasons.


> no salary cut

Unlikely. A lot of the reason the pay here is so good is because of the high cost of living.


This isn't right: Google and similar companies pay based on the local market and not cost of living.

London is a great example: high cost of living, low market rates for top talent, low pay from the FAANGs.

Pittsburgh is an example in the other direction: low cost of living, relatively high market rates, relatively high pay from the FAANGs. Still lower than the Bay though.


> This isn't right: Google and similar companies pay based on the local market and not cost of living.

These factors are intertwined.


They're related, but we can pull them apart by looking at examples like the ones I gave where cost of living is high but the market rate is not, and the reverse.


Hasn't this been proven false by googlers living in other high cost cities yet earning significantly less than those in SF?


Yes. And if a Googler (and this is true if most others major tech companies too) transfers from SF or NYC to another market, their salary usually drops. In fairness, the drop isn’t 50% or anything like that. And levels (which define the bonus structure) are still the same.

If a large company was doing a mass-migration of employees to a new, lower-cost city, it might make sense to keep salaries consistent. But let’s not kid ourselves and think that new hires at that new location would still be hired at the SF rate.

And as others have pointed out, if the salary did remain that high and you left, it’s almost guaranteed that your next job would not have that kind of salary.

Personal anecdote: when I moved from NYC to Seattle, I didn’t take a pay cut (I was switching industries), but the recruiter knew my Seattle market-rate was lower than my NYC market-rate. She tried to console me with promises of lower-cost of living (in fact, I pay more in rent now, but in fairness my equivalent apartment in Seattle would be 25% higher in NYC) — which wasn’t really true. But the tax difference was/is so massive, that it really does offset the salary difference, even at market rate. And if I were to transfer from Seattle to NYC, I would insist on getting a pay increase to offset those higher costs.

I don’t like employers lowering salaries if an employee moves to another lower-cost city (mostly because in many cases they are already paying hire taxes in those expensive markets and it feels punitive to get to pay less taxes and a lower salary for the same work/person), but it’s very common. That said, I don’t think it’s possible for very large companies to follow the Basecamp approach of universal salary structure based on being in the top X% of SF median or mean salaries (I forget which). As nice as that is for a smaller company, if you’ve got 100,000 employees (not counting contractors) potentially paying people 4x market rate doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t scale.

That said, there are always exceptions. If a person is valuable enough to the business, that person can get whatever salary they want regardless of location.


Is the bonus structure really identical in all markets? I've observed a >10x difference in initial equity offers in different markets at GOOG, so I'd be surprised if the other equity compensation is identical across markets.


It gives the employees leverage during negotiations [0] but it doesn't influence the revenue because Google is a international company, the domestic SF market only represents a small part of the revenue Google receives.

[0] "I wont move to SF if you dont give me enough to pay rent"


There's at least one large tech company that has located themselves totally outside the typical tech hubs - Epic Systems, in Madison. I interviewed for them after graduation but ended up taking a job at Facebook in Seattle.

The offer was for half my current salary. They tried to argue that with the cost of living adjustment I could buy a house, but what 22-year-old wants to buy a house? Locating in Madison is kind of a physical manifestation of their business strategy - avoid any competition, pay sub-market rates and issue strict, possibly non-enforceable non-compete clauses.

It works for people who really want to live in the Midwest. I think there's a spectrum between "live to work" and "work to live", and I think most ambitious college grads actually want many opportunities, for a while at least.


It’s also part of their strategy to churn through 22-25 year olds by overworking them in their first jobs out of college when they likely don’t have as many family obligations or well calibrated expectations for what work-life balance entails. And it saves them money since they don’t have to promote that many people to senior positions.

There are plenty of other companies outside big tech hubs, you just don’t hear about them as much and they don’t recruit the same way a lot of other tech companies do. For example, Epic’s competitor Cerner is in Kansas City which many people on this post are using as an example of a cheap place with a small tech scene, despite Cerner employing over 10K


Quite frankly, I think Epic Systems realizes it can't compete with Facebook. But the value is much better in comparison to many non-FAANG Bay Area companies.

I was actually in a similar situation, where Capital One offered 90K for Richmond, VA and it seemed better than ~120k offer in the Bay Area. But then I got a Google offer and stopped considering both of the others.

The high-CoL companies really only make sense financially if you're in the upper tiers of pay (and/or on the path to reaching that level of pay).


I work remotely for the past 6 years and will likely never have an office job again.

I live in my home town and have worked for start ups in Santa Monica, San Francisco, Boston, and New York.

I live in Eastern Connecticut, which is the side on the state that people often do not know about. It's a 2.5 hour drive to New York or Boston. It's not as affluent as the weat side, close to New York.

I do a lot of gardening when the weather permits.

https://russell.ballestrini.net/how-to-work-from-home-the-ro...


The article mentions DC and I'd just like vent about how miserable a place this is to live in. I see some people spend 10 hours a week and often more just commuting to work. It's overpriced. And when you look at the state of IT in the federal government you realize why this government fails so badly at non-tech things.

I'll be running away from the major cities as fast as possible as soon as possible.

Yuck. You actually lose money working in DC, the salaries aren't even worth.


> You actually lose money working in DC, the salaries aren't even worth.

People around DC have such low salaries that they are among the richest counties in the country...

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/censu...


I didn't say I had a low salary. As a single guy living by himself, my salary is above or near most of the median HOUSEHOLD incomes listed in that article. However, the cost of living here eats it away. Compare a city like Philly to DC for instance. Last I checked, COL is 27% cheaper in Philly and salaries are only 3% below DC.

Which goes back to my original point: "Yuck. You actually lose money working in DC, the salaries aren't even worth."


That just proves that there's a certain class of rich people (diplomats? lawyers?) that have plenty of work in the D.C. area and they've carved some neighborhoods out for themselves. It doesn't prove anything about what life for a DBA in D.C. would be like.


Glassdoor shows the pay for DBAs in the DC area are above the national average.

For software developers, the median salaries are below those in SF and Seattle, but if you are a FAANG level engineer, Amazon’s pay scale in NOVA is identical to Seattle and Facebook pays similarly.

> carved some neighborhoods out for themselves

This is an effort to imply that the suburbs of DC with high median salaries are small enclaves. This could not be further from the truth. Fairfax County, which has the third highest median household income in the US, is over a million in population and the largest county in VA. Montgomery County is the largest county in Maryland, also over a million people. So these counties are not separated from the rest of the metro area, but instead have over 2 million people in an MSA of 6 million.


COL eats it away, the extra salary is not worth it. I'm sure its the same for SF, NYC, and other similar cities.


Outside of subsistence salaries, which are not sustainable long term through illness, emergency, and retirement, rate of growth of net worth is a better metric.

Point being, putting 2X thousand dollars a year in long term savings in NYC is a better financial choice than saving X thousand a year in Townsville but having a nicer neighborhood or something.

Not that the dichotomy works exactly that way, but adjusting gross salary of a senior software engineer by cost of living makes little sense since only part of her pay goes to cost of living.


The housing costs of some second/third/worse tier city are almost completely meaningless. Unless the job gave me a 10 year contract with a golden parachute or something. It doesn't matter if you can make the numbers work once, what matters is that you will almost certainly job hop 3 - 5 times, so you need to be in an area dense with employers to make that viable without having to move your life/family every time. Even if you never wind up changing jobs, the fact that you could matters, you're not completely fucked if things go south with one company. They don't own you (as much).


It seems to me that you're coming from a perspective where you don't have any roots at the time of your first job. I think it might be good to step back and realize while that may describe a lot of people who go off to college some place and then take a job anywhere, surely there are millions for whom it's not true. And 5-10 years in, if you are unmarried and change your mind, you can't necessarily make it work then for a number of reasons, including that in a hot tech area, you're already old and therefore useless.


Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

That goes twice if your significant other also has a similar career trajectory.


This statement could be made in a job where remote work doesn’t exist, but thankfully it does. There’s more than enough work out there.


Then why is the article talking about where the jobs should be? If this was actually a reality then this post wouldn't exist.


Exactly. Who wants to live in a company town? I don't.


isn't SF a company town?


A company town is one where there's only one major employer. Things may be good for you if you work for that employer, but they have an enormous amount of leverage over you and their other employees. It's also risky long term, because the town's outcomes are tied strongly not just to one industry but one employer.


I believe we in the software industry have a moral duty to pursue remote, distributed work, as much as possible, for a few reasons:

The software that runs the world should be developed by people living all over the world, not just people who can move to a few cities. To me, this is part of real diversity. We talk about gathering requirements for software. Well, it's easier to do it when the people developing the software are as diverse as possible. Limiting these jobs to people who are willing and able to move to one of the tech hubs is bound to limit some kinds of diversity.

People should be free to live in and support their local communities. I think a lot of the political polarization that has been building up lately, particularly in the US, is between the "elites" in big cities and the "regular people" in the rest of the country. We should try to reduce that gap. Of course, people who find their local community intolerable should be free to move elsewhere.

Remote work, especially when it's primarily text-based, is also more equitable for people with disabilities. Blind people benefit somewhat from the fact that nobody is relying on facial expressions or body language (assuming video calls aren't a routine thing). For people with other kinds of disabilities, the benefits can be far greater. What would you do if a deaf person or a person with a severe speech impediment applied for a job on your on-site team? Well, if you're primarily using text, it's not as big an issue. Sure, we can always accommodate specific people with specific disabilities, but it's better if the normal way of doing things already works for them.

Disclosure: I currently work at Microsoft, on the main Redmond campus. So call me a hypocrite if you like. But I honestly think I'm doing a lot of good where I'm at, since I work on the Windows accessibility team. I do sometimes bring up the subject of remote work with my colleagues. And whenever I move on, I will probably insist that my next job be remote.


I've never understood why with IT jobs in the UK that they're all centred around London. Especially when they then offshore bits of the company to India or Eastern/Southern Europe requiring contracted staff to use a VPN.

It seems companies want staff onsite in London, purely for the enjoyment of making people commute there. This does no good for the environment other than help to conversion of fossil fuel into co².

If people are to be managed in things like "sprints" or other ticket monitoring/work managing systems then there's no reason why people can't work from home so long as they're happy to communicate on normal daily/weekly management calls.

Bring on telecommuting, it works for and helps everyone.


Or it could just be that most people aren't in your sort of 'maximise house size' game.

I've done remote work, and you know what?

I'd rather live in a small flat in London than have a big old house in the North because everything is in London. It's _the_ city in the UK.

If that ever changes (I sincerely doubt it will primarily because essentially all of the wealth is there) it'll probably take multiple generations.


> Especially when they then offshore bits of the company to India or Eastern/Southern Europe requiring contracted staff to use a VPN.

But that's the point, isn't it? If you're giving up on locality, you might as well hire someone cheap. The fact that they can commute into the office is one of the things keeping the salaries of UK workers higher.

In other words, be careful with what you wish for, you just might get it.


Offshore does not equal cheaper. Often what you think you save in salary, you spend in communication overheads.


What communication overhead, if you've already said you are in favor of telecommuting?


Communicating across differences in language, culture and just simple local knowledge - in other words, considerable overhead.


True for offshoring to (for example) India, but almost negligible for offshoring to many parts of Europe.


There is still an accountability problem. It's very common for Indian IT contractors to tell you that they assign their best employees to your project and then in reality fill the seat with some intern or trainee that hasn't even finished his first project.


So don't use a contractor. Open an Indian office and hire people directly.


I suppose what I'm arguing for is keeping onshore, but allowing people to telecommute. They all speak the same language and understanding. The company doesn't lose anything, probably saves a great deal in real estate and building insurance.


Yeah, but why would they do that, if balfirevic is right (and I think he is)? Once everyone is telecommuting, the question becomes: do I want to pay a 50%-80% premium to get a native speaker, instead of someone who speaks it quite well and might have even worked previously in the UK?


I don't know, but there is often quality of work comes into question.

Businesses who look to offshore expect it to be cheap, they often find that cheap doesn't mean good. Good offshore may cost a similar amount to good onshore. Offshore may be be unsocial hours for local time.

There's also often a cost of the business decision makers taking a jolly trip to the offshore location to see their offices (no idea why this is needed), if telecommuting doesn't work well enough to trust the remote office, why go there?


There's a push to make less expensive northern cities (Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool) appealing for tech. London still has (and will do for the foreseeable future) the lion's share, but there plenty of good tech jobs up north.


Same with the Scottish central belt. There are plenty of good jobs up here. Part of the reason for the London centricness is that relatively few people realise just how many good jobs there are outside of London.


All the jobs are a few clicks away from being found. London probably offers quite a few amenities that people want, even though they hate many aspects of it. One of the crucial amenities a big city provides is security that if you lose an income stream, you will be able to get another easily.

How much are people willing to pay for that?


If you're a software engineer that security exists in every major city. Plus the cost of living to salary ratio is so much better that it's far easier to save an emergency fund.


Why though, I don't see what the appeal is with London. There's bits in the Thames Valley, but not much.


People move to where the economic activity is. Typically the best and most in demand skills go first because they get payed extra. This re-enforces the importance of these areas. That's how big cities emerged. They are concentrations of people with skills and supporting infrastructure.

Despite the cost of living (which is insane), San Francisco is still attractive to software companies because of the insane numbers of people with software skills in the area.

IMHO there are a few things that are accelerating this: 1) dropping cost of of transport (clean energy, autonomous driving/flying, etc.) this will allow people to move more efficiently and more often and with less guilt about environmental concerns. 2) improving tooling for remote work. 3) co-working spaces and other flexible work infrastructure. 4) the gig economy, work, living, eating, transport, it's basically all people outsourcing things to each other.


> "physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable"

I always remain suspicious of this, because there's so many bad managers out there who equate "working hard" with "being at your desk for a long time" and have no idea how to manage a team if they can't eyeball them. Is being physically present a genuine advantage to the organisation, or does it just make managers feel better?


I wonder why 100% remote positions and companies are still marginal. Software engineering is one of the few industries where remote work is possible, and yet hardly available, despite obvious advantages.


Because remote is hard, if it would be just about typing code then yes you could live in igloo in Greenland.

You need people who are able to work remotely together. It is not only about having really smart devs who can grasp how to do Y with tech Z. It is also about having really smart managers and really smart company owners. Building such a team takes years, it is not like you can hire 10 devs, a manager and dump loads of cash on them to build a product.

First you have to get all those different people to trust each other. Then there are differences in ideas how things should be done, it is hard to solve some of those when people are in the same room. People have different temperaments, they have different ambitions.

We have all the technology to communicate but people have problems with stating their ideas in clear way in writing. Calling might help a bit, but to build trust you have to work with someone face to face and go trough rough times together.


Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's worth trying. For an industry so ostensibly focused on innovation and experimentation, much of tech remains as conservative as any other in terms of trying out new ways of work. Though certainly there are some bright spots opening up to remote:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21764110

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19444960


This is a bit weird argument from my point of view.

I argued about that it is hard to get 100% remote companies with 100% remote positions. Nothing about no one should ever do it. If you have smart people who you trust, you can do it.

You bring up examples of companies that are doing remote work so someone is trying to do that. It works for them. Expecting every company to do it is not the way to go.

Every company should be doing what is best for them, based on people and possibilities they have. Just like Yahoo tried remote work and Merissa Mayer come up with remote work ban, not sure if it was good for company but that was their decision.


The point is that more companies should not fear experimentation, and should try different policies. If it doesn’t improve, don’t use it. If it does, set a new standard. That’s how advancement works.


> Because remote is hard, if it would be just about typing code then yes you could live in igloo in Greenland.

So is writing maintainable code with actual documentation, etc. And I find that there's a lot of overlap between good remote work and that sort of development.

It's a lot hard to slap together undocumented spaghetti and then hand it off to a coworker if you can't bring them over, point at a monitor, and redraw the UML diagram for the eighteenth time with dry erase marker.


Yes, I agree.

Then someone could argue: "but you can put linters, automated checks, robust testing". We all know it is not going to work because you cannot fix people problems with technology. I would say that is main point of my argument, even if you have technology to communicate over distance, it is not going to fix people problems.


In my experience, remote work remains less effective than being physically present. Especially if you are never present. It just makes coordination and socialization so much more difficult.


>> If Google announced it was moving everything to Pittsburgh, ~80% of the company would quit.

They don't have to move everything to Pittsburgh, they could just open a small office there and give their employees the option to move there.

>> People expected telecommuting to change this, but even though we have many technical tools that make remote work far more practical than it was even ten years ago, physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable.

I think office politics are to blame for this. Remote people are often more productive than those who are on-site but they are less likely to be promoted in a mixed envrionment. That's why it's often better if everyone is remote; then everyone has equal opportunity.

>> Good ideas flow more freely between organizations

So do bad ideas. Bad ideas backed by a lot of money spread like the plague.

>> Coordination between organizations is easier

So that they can make cartels which erode workers' rights and monopolize industries.

>> Switching jobs is easier, so people don't get as stuck in jobs they don't like

They can be forced to live in a horrible place that they hate, but at least they can distract themselves from their misery by changing companies all the time to give themselves the illusion of hope.

>> Ease of switching also allows people to take larger career risks

To the point that everyone in your workplace is focused on risky career politics instead of producing actual value.


> They don't have to move everything to Pittsburgh, they could just open a small office there and give their employees the option to move there.

Google has had an office in Pittsburgh for over a decade now. There is physical office space for 2-3x the employees it has now and year after year, the growth there does not exceed the overall company growth. Turns out that people don’t really want to relocate to cheap cities in droves.


> They don't have to move everything to Pittsburgh, they could just open a small office there and give their employees the option to move there.

They've already done this, in ~2004, and the Pittsburgh office has maybe 1,000 people?


This is a classic example of a situation where the interests of individuals and companies are not aligned with the wider national interest. Yes, it makes tremendous economic sense for people and companies to co-locate in cities. In a country where individuals have a choice to live in an urban or a rural environment, and their demonstrated preference is to live in an urban environment, then urbanization becomes a self-reinforcing positive economic spiral.

However, this spiral is offset by a negative economic spiral in rural areas. As the national currency appreciates due to the increasing competitiveness of urban centers, rural industry becomes less and less competitive. When a national economy is in a downturn, the central bank can devalue the national currency to improve the price-competitiveness of national products for export; however, rural economies don't have this option as they share a currency with urban centers. So rural communities continue their downward economic spiral.

Why is this a problem? If we could force the rural laggards to move to urban centers, or if rural populations didn't hold outsize influence over the political process, it wouldn't be. But we can neither coerce rural depopulation nor can we make that kind of political change. So the situation continues.

Unfortunately, there will be a price to pay. Increasing political polarization leads to civil conflict. The EU narrowly avoided collapse by bailing out the Greeks - the US Congress has been practicing "bailouts" for a century (at least) with pork-barrel legislation. So let people move to jobs - as long as they're cognizant that their taxes will continue to go back where they came from.


My hodgepodge of notions about jobs, people, geography.

I have a very Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) and Jane Jacobs (Life and Death of Cities) themed view of population centers. What would it take to recreate (clone) Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, etc? Rhetorical question, everyone is already trying to do this. It comes down to clarity of purpose, investment, and riding economic trends.

People getting married and starting families is mostly an economic decision. Consequently, young families will relocate as needed. Future employers and governments should be mindful and help.

There are always multiple trends working simultaneously. Cities, especially coastal, will continue to become more dense. But there's also a smaller trend (demand) to return to the land. So places like Kansas should invest in restoring locally owned, smaller farms and enterprises.

Modeled on how Washington State created a thriving ecosystem for wine. Apply that strategy to whatever.


To me, it sounds as simple as everybody does what he thinks is best for him:

1. Companies are founded in the big cities, to have access to talent

2. People move to big cities to have access to better jobs

As long as the benefits outweigh the cost, the chances are small that anything changes...


Where this simple model fails is that existing residents oppose the construction of additional housing. Housing prices rise, fewer people can afford to move there, and renters with lower paying jobs get forced out.


People do move. Silicon Valley itself is a product of people moving to the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Of the eight founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, only Gordon Moore was from the Bay Area.

Large, successful companies create the conditions for attracting employees to new locations. Both Seattle and Austin are examples of this. Earlier, IBM had a practice of locating in small to medium sized cities like Kingston, NY, Rochester, MN or Sunnyvale, CA. In the '50s and '60s the aerospace industry was highly mobile, with engineers moving from the North and East to the South and West.


(author)

People do move. The post is arguing that (a) this is a good thing and (b) we should allow more housing construction to facilitate it (and to keep existing residents from getting forced out).


> even though we have many technical tools that make remote work far more practical than it was even ten years ago, physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable.

I've seen this artificially enforced by executives who refuse to engage in a discussion about remote work. There are a lot of them, and until they feel comfortable managing remotely, remote workers can't flourish. So it's nothing to do with the nature or quality of remote work. We just don't have enough truly remote friendly execs.


> A major factor is that current employees don't want to move. If Google announced it was moving everything to Pittsburgh, ~80% of the company would quit. People put down roots and get attached to areas, generally more so than to jobs.

That's the wrong argument to make. It's not about moving somewhere, but deciding to build a new center somewhere else (in this case Pittsburgh).


Perhaps read the next paragraph? "New companies, however, don't have employees they would need to move. Why do tech startups choose the Bay when almost anywhere else would be cheaper? I see two main answers: to be close to their investors and to be able to hire from a deep talent pool."


I hate to say it but the reason I’m in SF and not in Ohio is 100% due to the culture. There’s simply more stuff to do here, more creative people and I feel like I fit in better than Ohio (where I’m from).

I’ve had the opportunity to move back but I won’t, not for any amount of money or prospect of owning a big house or early retirement.


People always talk about HQ2 being in Dc (and formerly NYC) but they simultaneously announced 5,000 jobs in Nashville.

[0] https://www.newschannel5.com/news/amazon-in-nashville-what-i...


The problem with making decisions based on inaccurate facts is you can get very weird results.

There's really not much in the article based on actual data; it all seems to be meme stuff that "everyone knows" but google queries seem to oppose.

The main problem I've seen at companies that have "... ran out of talented devs that wanted to work in ..." stories is the labor pool is infinite IF the pay is there. As an example from the article, the median metro income in Milwaukee is $35K and in SF is $92K. And I found an infographic portraying the average software engineer pay in SF as $129K. Therefore HR needs to produce a salary for the new remote office employees and they run some simple math formulas and declare its financially irresponsible to pay a Milwaukee software developer more than 35/92*129 or $49K.

The problem is, again, via googling, the average software engineer on the ground right now in Milwaukee gets $68K.

Needless to say, if the locals will pay $68K and the remote coastal office will only pay $49K, the new remote office companies will never get an applicant who can even fizzbuzz much less provide value. I totally understand how the locals can produce world class software but remote offices "... ran out of talented devs ..." and decided they had to move back to SF and pay $129K again.

Its a youthful thinking mistake to think overly binary; either everyone gotta decentralize or everyone gotta centralize and either extreme tend to get owned in the competitive market by folks who compromise in the middle.

The main reason pay averages out more than people would think, is there is NO averaging of management demands for results. Its not like management is only going to demand 38% of the results and productivity from the new Milwaukee workers vs the SF workers regardless what they pay them.


If you're going for VC capital you have two choices. The bay area and NYC.

I live in Pittsburgh. I like Pittsburgh. But I'm also realistic. There's no VC money here.

If I wanted to work on something that capital N Needed VC money I'd move. But I don't so I'm good.


I wonder how the numbers will shake out for the McKesson Corporation move from San Francisco to Irving, Texas.


It's kinda cool that the blog itself is aggregating FB and HN comments for the article.


[flagged]


Value is absolutely added by both, and suggesting otherwise is pretty naive.

Landlords take on the responsibility for long-term ownership and maintenance of a property and give people access to it on a shorter term basis that is much easier to get out of.

Banks give access to money that you don't currently have with understanding that you will pay them back a premium over time for that service.

If you "eliminated landlords and private sale of land", you would pretty quickly end up with a system consisting of landlords and private sale of land, maybe under a new names.


In mainland China, before the communist revolution landlords used to be called "dizhu" (literally "land lord"). The name took on bad connotations (the communist revolutionaries didn't take kindly to landlords), and nowadays they're called "fangdong" instead. Apart from the fact that the land is technically on a 99 year lease from the government not owned, a "fangdong" is still pretty much the same as a landlord anywhere else.


> Banks give access to money that you don't currently have with understanding that you will pay them back a premium over time for that service.

By using money that they don't have either. I think that part is important to remember. The difference between a bank and a private person is not that the bank has money to lend. It's that they are allowed to lend money they don't have. If you do that it's called fraud.


You most certainly can lend money you don't have. Of course, you're going to have to come up with it somehow (so will the bank), likely by borrowing it. Which is fundamentally no different than what a bank does, albeit their balance sheets are larger and counterparties different. It's "borrowing" all the way down,and how the financial system works.


> Of course, you're going to have to come up with it somehow (so will the bank),

For the most part modern banks can lend money that didn't exist until they lend it to you and that stops existing the moment you pay it back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking


>banks can lend money that didn't exist until they lend it to you and that stops existing the moment you pay it back

Of course. How else should the money supply increase but to create it out of thin air? All of it is. Imagine not being able to buy a house until Fred paid mortgage his off? This is a reason why getting off the gold standard was a good idea. What's the point of having a dollar be equivalent to the price of an ounce of gold (which itself is an arbitrary peg), along with all the mechanisms required to maintain that peg? If you want something equal to the value of an ounce of gold, buy an ounce of gold.

This is what Bitcoin proponents get wrong about its use as a currency; a static supply is a problem. Why would you want to limit people's ability to perform transactions in the unit of account? If you can't increase the supply as needed, then you have to find ways to further divide what's out there (which is just the other side of the same coin).


Fractional reserve is what makes possible for banks to lend (part of) the money that clients deposit. In a full reserve system every single dollar in client deposits would be kept in the vaults and the banks could lend only their own capital.


There are plenty of countries where the state owns and manages a substantial proportion of housing. As high as 34% in the Netherlands[1] for example.

[1] http://www.iut.nu/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Social-Housing-...


Social housing associations in Netherlands are not owned or managed by the state.


Okay, how about Singapore?


https://boingboing.net/2018/03/11/capitalist-ideal.html

"Singapore is indeed a country where rich people run pretty much everything and where the finance sector holds primacy. It's also an autocracy run by a dynastic series of strongmen who have expropriated 90% of the land on behalf of the state, which owns nearly all the nation's housing, and whose sovereign wealth fund has a serious stake in most of the country's significant businesses.

"Singapore is a template for what China hopes to become: a state that uses surveillance, selective law enforcement, and claustrophobic control over individual behavior, in tandem with market systems, to create wealth and (above all else) stability -- perpetual rule for the people on top."


That’s bad, but what about Singapore’s housing policy?


Have you considered that if people didn't pay rent or mortgages to the bank that it would be trivial for many people to self-finance repairs? Alternatively, we could make the government responsible for ones that individuals can't afford.


Sure, they could self-finance repairs. But how do you get from here to there, and is there the promised land you think it is?

You can't just take the houses away from landlords and rip up all the mortgages - not without destroying the economy. For example, there's a lot of peoples' pensions that are invested in mortgage-backed securities. Sure, it would be nice not to have a mortgage - but maybe not at the price of also not having a pension.

So, how do we get to this place of no landlords and no mortgages without blowing up large chunks of the economy? By the government buying all the mortgages and all the landlord-owned property. That's... rather a large amount of money. Where's the government going to get it? Either from taxes, or from just creating it. That would be quite a bit in taxes, which is kind of zero-sum (and if you think that they're just going to take the taxes from other people, it very rarely works that way). And creating the money would be inflationary, which causes its own kind of damage.

And, would this be the promised land? It would be a land where nobody built new houses ever again, or else a land where the government kept spending money to buy new houses. In one case you'd see the supply of houses age and deteriorate over time. In the other case, you'd see the decision of how many new houses to make being made politically, rather than by the market. That usually works out sub-optimally.

So be careful what you wish for. Not having to pay rent sounds nice. But your solution may be worse than the current problem.


> Have you considered that if people didn't pay rent or mortgages to the bank that it would be trivial for many people to self-finance repairs?

I paid cash for my house, and yes, that does mean that my present income is more fully available for repairs.

Rent and mortgages don't go solely toward upkeep of the property. The property itself has a value.

On the extreme short end of space ownership, you have hotel rooms that you rent day to day.

Zooming out a bit more, you have apartments and rental houses that you can rent month to month or year to year from the land lord.

Zooming out even more, you have mortgages, which are basically you in a rent-to-own agreement with a bank over the course of the mortgage.

I don't think most people have issues paying night-to-night for hotels. If you don't mind paying for a night in a hotel, why would longer term space rentals be an issue?

Further, mortgage rates are more or less at all time lows. So the bank isn't even taking that big of a cut of your money.

Landlords don't make that great of a return on their money either. Housing prices effect them just as much as someone buying a primary residence. Often the rent is too damn high because the housing cost itself is too damn high.

As to why housing markets in some major metros are so messed up, that seems to be largely down to artificial restrictions on supply vs demand.


Perhaps the U.S. could try implementing a land-value tax.


For most of us here, there's no reason to move anywhere at all. Programmers can work from anywhere in the world. We need to let go of the idea that "work" means 2 hours of commute and sitting in an open plan under constant barrage of interruptions for 40 hours a week. We need to let go of _all_ the components of this definition, from "40 hours" to "office" to "commute". There are jobs which have to be done in the office only. Programming is not one of those jobs.


Maybe it's because I'm relatively young, but I actually like working in an office. I bike 15 minutes to work rather than commuting 2 hours, because my work pays me enough to live close by. I spend some of my time collaborating closely with smart people who are a lot more experienced than me, which seems to be the fastest way to learn. I spend then rest of the time with headphones on facing the corner of the open office, hopefully getting absorbed in my work to the point where I'm not too distracted by the people around me. I eat free food that's better than anything I could make at home.

I've had periods of working from home in my life and they've been lonely and unproductive in comparison.

My only point is that there _are_ some people who genuinely prefer working at an office.


> I bike 15 minutes to work rather than commuting 2 hours, because my work pays me enough to live close by.

For now. Unless you marry another professional, it will be difficult to keep that commute if you decide to start a family.

Part of the problem with the Bay Area and NYC is that it's cradle-to-grave unsustainable. That's not to say people don't make it work, but it's unlikely that the average tech worker in those places has replacement-level fertility or will hang around the area with their kids and grandkids to form a multi-generation household.


I agree that bay area and NYC seem to both have housing costs that outstrip even the high salaries available there. Seattle has similar pay but the cost of living hasn't quite caught up yet. A lot of young professionals buying homes in the city still. Might change in another 10 years though.


In fairly old and I like going to the office most days. I worked for years as a sole developer on a project. While I worked from an office I didn't collaborate with others in any meaningful way, yet I still liked going into the office. I've certainly never been friends with my coworkers, but it's really nice to have the same people around with the same goals.

I can understand work-from-home like once a week though. I've also never had more than 15 minute commute though.

Nowadays I work in on classified material, so there's no possibility whatsoever of remote work.


Even for someone who likes the office, work from home once a week is a boon. I'd prefer a 4-day workweek, but I'll take what I can get.


And those people can come to the office. But it should really not be a requirement, and work should be structured in such a way as to not penalize people who are remote: around written communication, with infrequent teleconferencing.


I think the problem is that as soon as everyone who has the opportunity to leave the office does so, the training effect for new developers is gone. It might be better for you and your personal performance, but is it better for the company overall?

That might not be so clear cut, and one of the reasons why especially big tech is so hesitant -- as opposed to companies that rely on the perk of remote work to be able to attract talent or pay less.


So all employers should reorganize to meet your preferences to be left alone?

It might work great for you, it would probably help your productivity. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't have downsides for many others!


This is a good example of the "so" tell for cognitive dissonance, whereby the sufferer tries to put words in my mouth and starts their diatribe with a "so".

It's a free country, "all employers" can do as they please. I just won't work for them if they are not in close proximity, and very few of them are. I'm not going to "move" for a job that I can do from anywhere in the world.


The bit about “so” seems wrong. You said

> it should really not be a requirement, and work should be structured in such a way as to not penalize people who are remote: around written communication, with infrequent teleconferencing

which is reasonably summarized as

> all employers should reorganize to meet your preferences to be left alone


I prefer working remote too and always have (and have done so for that past 4-5 years, I'm 28 years old now), but I don't expect the larger employment environment to conform to my wishes… actually I rather prefer the opposite happens because it makes finding interesting remote work opportunities easier (because I think that a lot of places are starting to have "remote work possible" but mainly its just a lot of noise in the signal compared to places where its the norm).


It could work. I think the best model is when a company/team adopts a remote-first mindset, then the people who prefer working that way can be productive and happy while people who prefer working in person can work together in an office.

My company is pretty well set-up for remote (lots of communication over email and chat, video in every meeting) but I still feel like I miss a lot when I'm not there in person.


It works great for programming but in my experience most of the job is requirements gathering. Even if I worked in a place that could constantly feed me programming tasks I'd probably just feel like a code monkey and not a developer.


Are you claiming that we don't need to be in offices because it's been validated by research or because it's convenient to your worldview?


Because I've been working from home for a while. I wake up when I want, without an alarm. I drink a couple cups of coffee and take a shower, then I go to my "office" downstairs and work. When I'm bored I practice electric guitar or do cardio. Then I work some more. When I'm tired I go do something else, or take a nap. When I'm in the mood for music, I can listen to it on my studio monitors. When I want to work from my backyard in the summer I unplug one of my clients' laptops and go work in my backyard. And, get this, _nobody_ can interrupt my flow unless I choose to be interrupted. I can't imagine being productive in what passes for a regular "office" nowadays.


I would get extremely lonely if I spent time in only 1 physical space the majority of the time. Also I'd want to be with coworkers during the day. That's just me though - I know a lot of people love working from home and remote work.


Who do you work for, or at least what sort of thing are you working on? This sounds ideal to me, but I'm worried my skill set isn't as conducive to remote work.


I have a somewhat rare blend of skills in that I do deep learning (computer vision mostly) and I also do C++ (including low level optimization and CUDA). Usually you get one or the other, almost never both. So I don't really work _for_ anyone. I consult companies when things are too gnarly for them to figure out on their own. Thus far, I have more work than I can possibly handle.

Not a realistic setup for most people, of course, but my point stands: it's stupid to require butts in chairs nowadays. It's also very expensive. If I decide to expand, there's no way I'm renting an office of any kind, and there's no way I'm relying solely on the local talent pool.


Any recommendations on study path for this? Not due to the money/remote aspect, but rather I have genuine interest in these things specifically.

Would a curriculum like this be at all valuable: https://uh.edu/data-science-institute/education/tutorials-co...


> People expected telecommuting to change this, but even though we have many technical tools that make remote work far more practical than it was even ten years ago, physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable.

Not for software development. I'm sure there are plenty of industries where this is true. Software just isn't one of them. In fact, I'd argue the opposite for most software companies. They suffer from poor work and poor working conditions due to locating everyone in one location.


I'm happy to work for a company that embraces remote work, but it's undeniably more efficient and, for most people, fulfilling on a personal level to have a high-bandwidth face-to-face conversation--and "the wifi hiccuped, what did you say?", as happens here and without exception everywhere else I've been, isn't that.


Sure, the communication might be more fulfilling--the efficiency is debatable--for certain people but at a cost of the quality and quantity of work suffering, the commute, time wasted, money wasted on office rent, certain supplies, parking, lunch, tolls, etc.


That's just an argument for government subsidized fiber internet, repeating your self a few times a day is a minor inconvenience compared to commuting.


Some of the best work happens not during scheduled meetings, but in spontaneous conversations with coworkers at random times during the day. Fiber internet doesn't solve that.


You know, you can send a message to your coworker: "5 min call?" and BAM! One click of a button and you are talking live.


> undeniably more efficient

No. It's debatable. Many believe remote work is undeniably more efficient and the fulfillment you feel from high bandwidth conversations is a delusion.


Regardless of how good a substitute you feel remote communication is in general, the effect of network problems and such is an objective fact, not anyone's opinion or delusion.

Also, if we stipulate that my fulfillment from being in the office is irrelevant, that doesn't change the fact that other people will not conform to my preferred mode of communication. I'm fine with instant messaging, and a lot of people are, but in my experience, a majority don't or won't use it well.


I've been working remotely for 5 years. Left the Bay Area last year. Network problems have not been an issue. Comcast goes down for a day.. I tether. Are we really saying latency and the occasional video freeze is worth forcing the whole company to commute to the office? And live within an hour or so of everyone else?

The people who suck at communicating online suck in person too. At least online there's a record of who can't read or spell. And don't get me started on the hours I've had to wait while someone is in the hallway having a chat.


The people we're talking about are people whose entire job is communication. They're people persons. What don't you understand about that? I don't get to dictate how they work.

Anyway, I have other reasons for not wanting to work remotely too. I've seen many comments on HN from people that are very sure that the ideal for anyone technical is a private office that's utterly silent and undisturbed for concentration. That isn't me. I do get irritable if someone is having a long non-work conversation that's barely loud enough to be distracting, but I don't want to be shut up in a closet. People derive value from asking me stuff and vice versa.


You can also have poor work and poor working conditions in a remote environment - depends on how the team and yourself operate. A phrase I often tell friends who transition into indie work or remote work is a Merlin Mann phrase "You are your own worst manager".

Even if you want to argue this isn't true, developers still seem to end up in cities for the sake of networking.

(bias: I've been working remotely for ~7 years and had trouble justifying a move to a smaller off-corridor city)


Sure it's not a panacea for poor work. But it does allow one much more flexibility in terms of working conditions. Having a private space is now the default. That alone is an incredible change especially for knowledge workers. Not being subjected to the noise and distractions of others is huge as is being able to set up one's own office as one wants. As far as moving to smaller cities, that's hardly related to remote work or anything but labor laws when they favor employers so heavily as they do in the US. With zero job security, of course you'll stay in or around a major metro area. That's just common sense and won't change without legislation. It's not tech specific either. But in tech, you can pretty much move to any city in the world that will allow you to work. Hardly immobile.




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