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You can work on a solo project from anywhere in the world. To work effectively in a team you need to understand the code your code is interacting with, the prod
by superuser2 10y ago
You can work on a solo project from anywhere in the world. To work effectively in a team you need to understand the code your code is interacting with, the production environment, and how this all interacts with business needs. Being in the same room (or at least building) as the people who know these things is the most obvious way to get everyone that understanding.
Why the Bay Area? Because it has a huge collection of both jobs and employees. As an employee you have lots of options should things fall through with your current employer, and as an employer there is lots of talent you could potentially hire (though for a high price). No reason it had to be the Bay Area in particular, but it had to be somewhere.
If it moves somewhere else, it's likely that place's real estate market would be similarly inflated by an influx of professionals.
Some people (pretty much everyone who is vocal about this on HN) see remote work as the solution. I'm skeptical - it takes a lot to make your issue tracker, documentation, mailing lists etc. thorough enough that they're the only communication developers need. In my experience (and I expect at many companies) developers come across crucial bits of information through serendipitously overheard conversations, or by wandering over to people's desks, etc. such that if structured (i.e. either async or scheduled) communication were the only communication, things wouldn't get done as well or as quickly.
- Joof 10y agoI don't think remote work is the solution. However; every college in the country has a computer science program and many people are quite talented. Salaries are lower due to cost of living. Code doesn't have to be shipped to a port. It makes some sense to build more outside the valley.
- superuser2 10y agoAre you advocating for more dispersion of companies around the country, or a different tech hub? I'm not sure the former is good for me as an engineer. It'd be nice to afford a decent house, but less so if I have to sell it and move cross country to advance my career or flee an employer going the way of Yahoo. Barriers like geography, moving costs, social ties in different cities keeping the best employer-employee pairs from finding each other are a form of inefficiency that I'm not sure we should seek to introduce. I'd like the latter - we could build it somewhere more development-friendly, which would make it less insane than the Bay Area housing market, but putting a huge industry of well-paid professionals somewhere isn't compatible with low cost of living (see: Manhattan, DC).
- Joof 10y agoMore tech hubs. I'll admit that I don't know enough about housing, but the bay area and Manhattan are both water-restricted in terms of room for housing development and DC has political restrictions on land developmentment as well.