11 ms·

The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

80 points by pbhowmic 10y ago

whack 10y ago
Be careful what you wish for. In a world where physical proximity no longer matters, American programmers earning 6 figures, will have to compete against programmers from South America/Europe/Asia, all of whom earn significantly less than 6 figures. There currently exists a massive salary gap between equally qualified programmers, living in different regions of the world. Eliminating the physical-proximity perks, will produce a massive regression to the mean.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  In other words, if your job can be done from home or from Arkansas, it can be done from India.
  - jeffbush 10y ago
    I'd note that tech pundits and journalists have been saying for 20 years that many US jobs would move to India and other countries, but offshoring, while common, hasn't really made a dent in the US tech sector. It's interesting to think about why.
    - mhotchen 10y ago
      I set up an offshore team of four in India some years back. Two of the developers ended up being lackluster and let go, but two of them continued on as they were fairly decent. Even so the cultural difference was significant and it was difficult to manage them. I don't think it was their fault, they just had a very different views on what they considered was a completed task, how they went about asking for further requirements, etc. Whilst it was worth having them, there was a surprising and hidden overhead in cost for the cultural impact, as well as timezone issues. Later in my career I worked with a team from Hong Kong as well, the cultural gap was less significant and they were able to work well with the management style given. We still had timezone issues (moreso since I'm from the UK which is further from HK than from India), but because they interpreted tickets in the same way and had similar views on what the definition of done was things were far more harmonious. Communication is a huge factor in remote teams, and whilst there are lots of tools to aid it, communication styles across cultures can be very different which can cause a lot of friction.
      - whack 10y ago
        I'm guessing that none of the workers you're referring to are IIT graduates. I agree that American developers face little competition from the middle/lower end of developers in India. But the top developers in India (eg, the IIT grads and Google-India devs), in terms of raw talent and job performance, would easily out-compete the average American developer, while still being happy with a lower salary. This is where the physical-proximity-perks that American developers currently enjoy, really make a big difference.
        mhotchen 10y ago
        Yeah these definitely weren't top tier developers. Even so I was happy with the quality of the code on the two we retained, it was everything that goes around it that I struggled with. For example they wouldn't ask questions or admit that they're struggling with something. I saw a lot of this in the interviews as well, you would ask a question like "do you know what X is" and they would say yes, but then sit in silence. So you probe "well what is it?" and they would go "I'm not completely sure" or just try to make something up. I definitely agree with you though. We interviewed one person that was exceptionally good: very experienced, good comms, ticked all the boxes. His salary expectation was around a junior dev salary in the UK, which unfortunately was too high for management who had set a budget per developer, rather than thinking it was worth hiring him and one other instead of four lukewarm devs.
        JamesBarney 10y ago
        My understanding though is that if you're restricting yourself to top developers in India you should expect to be paying 40-80k(and rising) assuming you directly hired them. And this doesn't include setting up all of the infrastructure to hire overseas, not to mention the increased risk of operating out of two legal jurisdictions, timezone differences, and culture gaps.
      - mrfusion 10y ago
        What was the cultural issue exactly?
        10y ago
    - theunixbeard 10y ago
      I've always wondered why tech salaries in Western Europe were so much lower than the US (exc. Silicon Valley effect). Could it be the proximity to similiar-culture Eastern Europe where inexpensive developers are easily available?
      - Xylakant 10y ago
        Salaries in the US and Europe cannot easily be compared by the numbers alone. There are factors such as minimum PTO, health insurance, paid sick leave, pension payments, etc. that skew the bare numbers. You'll have to find an US job that has similar benefits as the european job to even be on a somewhat level ground.
        xiaoma 10y ago
        Pension payments??? What European business or country would pay pension to an American employee just for having worked there for a few years?
        Maultasche 10y ago
        The Netherlands will pay a pension to anyone who lives there past the age of 16. You'll get more money for every year you live there. One year of living there will get you something like 18 euros a month when you retire, but it's definitely more than zero. It's giving back to someone who has lived there and (presumably) has contributed by paying taxes. Someone who as lived there all their life only gets something like 800 euro a month, so I think that it's expected that you will have other savings or an employer-provided pension in addition. I've never lived in the Netherlands, but I hear that employers there will also contribute towards a pension for an employee. This pension will be managed by some sort of private company. I'm not sure if it's a defined contribution or defined benefits pension. The details on when you get your pension and how much you get probably depend on the company that is managing it. It may be that a couple years of working will get you a very small pension or it may be that there's a minimum qualifying period. In any case, you should be able to get some benefit from it, even if it's a one-time lump sum payment.
    - theunixbeard 10y ago
      I've always wondered why tech salaries in Western Europe were so much lower than the US (exc. Silicon Valley effect). Could it be the proximity to similiar-culture Eastern Europe where inexpensive developers are easily available?
    - whack 10y ago
      I think offshoring hasn't hurt the American tech scene, for precisely the same reasons that "working in SV and living in Arkansas" is so rare. Physical proximity matters. Being able to talk and hang out with your co-workers, face-to-face, in real-time, matters. This is why top SW companies like Google, despite hiring developers around the world, still focus on having teams that are working together in the same physical office, as opposed to geographically disparate teams.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Going for the extreme cheap will also have some problems South Americans (or even Mexico) will have a smaller time zone difference, less cultural differences. Southern western Europe might be a good source of developers as well
  - wmeredith 10y ago
    Eh, I've worked with teams in Arkansas and India and I'm not overly concerned. There are more barriers to collaboration than physical location. Culture and language are huge friction points when they don't align, not to mention responsiveness issues due to temporal displacement. You can just "deal with it" and your budget, codebase, and timeline will suffer. It adds a lot of overhead. Hiring a worker a timezone or two away that speaks the same language and shares a national, if not regional, culture with the rest of your team is an entirely different proposition than hiring one on the other side of the planet that speaks a different language. It CAN work, I've seen it. But I've seen it be a deal breaker much more often.
  - vmarsy 10y ago
    Working from the West coast regularly with people in India, Europe,and US east coast, I disagree. You certainly have some benefits of having teams spread out around the world, as you could virtually have someone working at any hour of the day. But communication is very hard with the foreign countries, because of 2 things: time difference, and some language barriers. Even with only the 3h time difference, communication with the east coast is sometimes problematic. It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US.
    - amyjess 10y ago
      > It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US. Or for that matter, if your QA is in India and your devs in the US need more information to investigate, that can take days... I worked at a company like that. I'd come into the office in the morning to see a ticket from a QA person in India, they didn't provide the information I needed to reproduce/investigate the bug, so I left a comment asking for it. Of course, they didn't get back to me until the middle of the night (my time), so I couldn't act on it until the next morning. And then, of course, I'd fix it, and they couldn't verify until the next night...
      - nitrogen 10y ago
        The response lag can be ameliorated to an extent by having lots of work going on in parallel so nobody is blocked on one critical reply from someone in another timezone. I've done remote development as an employee, remote development as a consultant as sole developer on a project, and local development as an employee working with other remote developers. IMO a lot of the issues people have come from inexperience with asynchronous communication. I would argue that growing up writing open source with international teams, using IRC and email lists, not only has made me appreciate remote work better, but also gave me a mindset to understand asynchronous distributed systems better, too. But it's not an insurmountable advantage; I believe any team, if it cares enough, can work effectively with remote developers, and get the morale and cost benefits of doing so.
  - sanj 10y ago
    Contracts written by a US company can be enforced far more easily in Arkansas than in India.
- jazzyk 10y ago
  Software development is not coding only. For quite a few roles, proximity does, and will always, matter.
- willholloway 10y ago
  There also currently exists a massive standard of living gap between different regions of the world. Further development and economic growth will also create a leveling effect. The future standard of living and costs in China and India looks a lot like the present in the United States. As economies grow, and regulations increase (another way of saying externalities start getting priced in) the wage gap will diminish.
jaggederest 10y ago
If you draw a circle 50 miles in diameter around LA, SF, NYC, Boston, and DC: basically anywhere outside of those circles in the mainland US is pretty reasonable. It's not just the rust belt, really. You can live in Miami, Seattle or Chicago and do just fine.
- Amygaz 10y ago
  And I would like to add that now is the time to buy within those metropolitan area, because they are expanding, so housing in the suburb is going up.
- xianshou 10y ago
  You're going to have to include Seattle in the "expensive" set either now or very soon. New homes are going for millions. But other than that, agreed, just go outside the commuting range of all the major hubs and it's cheap!
- ghaff 10y ago
  For that matter, I live about 40 miles outside of Boston/Cambridge and housing prices are pretty reasonable. Yeah, the commute in is a pain if you work in the city (although there's decent commuter rail service). But if you don't have to work in the city (I don't), there's reasonable housing within a distance that lets you go into the city for an evening. I think some of those other locations (SF in particular) probably have a bigger radius but a lot of the angst about housing prices turns out to apply to very specific urban locales. And new grads were complaining about the price of crappy Manhattan apartments at least since the 80s.
  - marchenko 10y ago
    Commuting outside of areas well-served by public transportation is a huge detriment to quality-of-life. Those extra hours really add up, especially during the shorter days of winter. The advantage of moving to a second or third city is that you can still enjoy the amenities of an urban or semi-urban setting at a lower price point. It doesn't even have to be in the Rust Belt (although personally I like Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Cleveland a great deal) - Raleigh and Charlotte are still affordable for people who like that area and climate. And there are any number of small towns in VT, NH, CO, UT, upstate NY, or central MA for the outdoorsy who don't need an urban setting
raverbashing 10y ago
So, people who build services for the internet finally found out it exists? And that if you work with github/slack/jira/several other services you already can work remotely? Really?!
- sotojuan 10y ago
  It's ironic that so many people build services to "connect" people over long distances and find it amazing to find out you can work over long distances.
  - TarpitCarnivore 10y ago
    Ironic is applying for a job at a company building one of those services and being told they don't offer remote positions.
- vram22 10y ago
  Good one, and quotable :-)
zappo2938 10y ago
Don't try and establish yourself in the tech industry outside of a tech hub.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Do you seriously believe that glib statement? That if you don't move to the Bay area or a reasonable image of it you might as well become a fast food worker or whatever? Yes, there are certain advantages to industry job density but I actually find it rather bad advice to frame a career in tech as inherently depending upon living in a half-dozen or so cities--that can't begin to accommodate everyone.
  - zappo2938 10y ago
    Yes, I strongly believe that if a person is starting in tech and not established with a reputation, they should move to a tech hub. It seems like a lot of people are going to downvote my opinion, however, I am sure that each and every person who does downvote this opinion lived in or near a tech hub when they started.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      I suppose it partly depends on how broadly you define "tech hub." If that includes 20-30 places worldwide, I'm not going to violently disagree. If it means Bay Area + Portland + Seattle + ...? Then I will. Especially because "tech" isn't limited to web/social/mobile.
      - zappo2938 10y ago
        If you want to work on a yacht, you have to move to Fort Lauderdale until you are established. There is no way around it. You can be a doctor anywhere, but if you are going to do medical research you have to be in New Orleans, New York Boston, DC / Maryland, or Chicago, maybe the Cleveland Clinic. If you are Marine Biologist you are living in Woods Hole, Monterey, or La Jolla. If you are doing aerospace engineering you are going to be living in Virginia, Southern California, or Washington. It is stupid to think that someone who wants to do 'web/social/mobile' can get a decent start outside of a place without lots of other people doing it. I don't think that there is anyone on Hacker News who can say they succeeded getting their start in the industry outside of a 'software' tech hub. If someone wants to be a serious software engineer they are going to have to commit to living in SF, DC, Boston, Austin, or Portland at some point in the beginning. It is disingenuous to tell people who are starting it is otherwise. Part of the commitment of being a software engineer is living in a place with lots of other software engineers for a little while. It is not fair to anyone starting out to say they don't have to move to where there is a lot of activity. It is so unfair.
FLUX-YOU 10y ago
Personally I wouldn't be comfortable if I had to persuade them to let me work remotely to take a mortgage when the company has access to so much local talent. Maybe I'm reading that wrong, but if it wasn't an issue for them, there wouldn't be any persuasion: "Hey, can I work remote from now on?", "Sure!"
- ghaff 10y ago
  That's reasonable. Unless you've established yourself as an "A-lister" (whatever that means exactly) that gets to set the rules, you may not want to move somewhere there are no local opportunities. But there are gradations between back-of-beyond and unaffordable tech central.
- simmons 10y ago
  I seem to be one of these "work for the valley from outside the valley" types, and I, too, would be nervous taking out a mortgage in an area where I might be relying on that one job. I resisted the temptation to move to some remote mountain hamlet, and instead sought some insurance by buying a home in my favorite non-SV tech area. (Although its been 13 years since I've done any work for a local company.) Yet, I know people who do invest in the only-remote lifestyle, despite the stress when they are in between jobs. They must have nerves of steel.
toomanythings4 10y ago
In 1992, a friend got a job in the valley and I visited him when I was out there visiting the HQ for my company. He asked me to go with him to check out a condo he was thinking of buying. Remember that these are 1992 prices. The two-bedroom place we looked at was just like one of my first apartments. When the agent said it was $250K, I almost fell on the floor. My wife and I had just bought our first house, which was about three times bigger as this condo with a large front and back yard in a nice middle class neighborhood, for $80K in St. Louis. A few years ago, I saw him again. He has never owned a house but he now lives in a much nicer condo for $1.25 million. However, that condo just looks like a much nicer, updated version of that same apartment. He could have lived cheaper at an upscale, full service hotel in my town.
- lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
  And the difference is you're stuck living in a "nice middle class neighborhood" with a ton of space you probably don't need. For many people moving to cities the value of the area is worth many times the value of the space. I wouldn't trade my nyc studio for a McMansion back in bumfuck SC no matter how much you offered me; and I think there must be a large population that shares that sentiment.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    I haven't spent lots of time in SV, but it pretty much felt like a newer, nicer northern NJ with great weather to when I've visited. Big sea of strip malls and suburbia.
    - amyjess 10y ago
      Eh, I think that's more SoCal (LA/SD) than NorCal (SV). SoCal feels like a giant sprawling suburb with great weather, and NorCal is just cold, expensive, and full of hipsters. Like, there's a very large chance I'll end up moving to SoCal if I'm ever forced to leave Texas (which might actually happen next year), but I have no desire to live in NorCal even if you paid me seven figures.
drewg123 10y ago
I escaped a year ago & live just outside of Richmond VA now. We relocated back to the east coast to be near family, and because of my wife's career. I have to travel to the bay area at least quarterly, but it has worked out to be 6 to 7 times per year. Given no other constraints, I'd never pick Richmond, as air travel from here to SJC/SFO is not great. I'd much rather live an easy commute from a major airport with direct flights to SJC or SFO. As it is, I can drive 2 (or 4 with traffic) hours to IAD and fly direct with a decent schedule, or I can fly from RIC and change planes with a fairly lousy schedule. The cost of living is so much lower between real estate costs and state taxes that the economics are much better. The day I changed my address from Mountain View to Richmond in WorkDay was like getting a raise. Even if I was a consultant and had to pay for my own travel, the economics would still work out to be quite a better.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Yup, similar story here. We moved for family + get out of the city. Cost of Living was something we knew was going to be lower but man, is it lower. It takes some adjustment and I'm sure that remote work isn't for everyone but if you can find a team that it works for it really feels a bit like the future.
jeffbush 10y ago
While I've successfully managed distributed teams (and there are a number of companies that do it heavily), working remotely is not a panacea. There is definitely something to be said for face-to-face communications. People miss out on a lot of hallway conversations when they aren't in the same place. There are a lot of other tribal dynamics that come into play when you separate people, even when they're at opposite ends of the same building. Even a company like Google with global presence and an amazing proprietary internal video chat system generally discourages remote working and often defrags teams (reorganizes them so they are all in the same geography). And while it may be possible to get your current employer to let you move out of state, many employers are going to be reluctant to hire someone who is already remote and is an unknown quantity in terms of output. This potentially limits job mobility, one of the perks of living in a tech hub.
jeffbush 10y ago
I had to chuckle a little that this mentions Grand Rapids. I grew up there and moved to Silicon Valley 18 years ago. I hated it there: brutal long winters (Google "lake effect"), hot humid summers, mosquitos, and a socially conservative monoculture. I definitely understand people's frustration with the real estate situation around here, but there's more to an area than just jobs and houses.
- goda90 10y ago
  Some people enjoy the snow, green everywhere, no water restrictions, and less traffic. Sure mosquitos suck, but so does having everything be more expensive. There definitely is more to it than jobs and houses, so I chose to return home to the Midwest to get paid a little less(though not much in terms of cost of living) than I would at a Silicon Valley firm.
  - jeffbush 10y ago
    Yeah, there are millions of people who live in the midwest who obviously disagree with me. :)
- cponeill 10y ago
  I also grew up in GR and moved to Seattle a little over 16 years ago. Reading the term "lake effect" cracked me up since it has been so long since I last heard it. Have you been back recently at all? Downtown has a bit more going on but wouldn't want to move back at all. Those winters are brutal.
  - jeffbush 10y ago
    I haven't been back in seven years. Relatives usually come out to visit me. I'm too soft now to survive a winter there. :)
    - cponeill 10y ago
      I went back for the first time in ten years about a year ago and was surprised at how much downtown has changed. I also went back during ArtPrize which is very overwhelming. I have never seen so many people in downtown GR at one time in my life. Also, some of the new breweries there are great. But I still refuse to go back and visit during the cold months. Like you, there is no way I could survive a winter there.
epoxyhockey 10y ago
Many companies will want to adjust your salary downward if you are moving from the Bay Area to a lower cost of living location. This article seems to gloss over that fact.
jphillipsio 10y ago
I live in Michigan and work for a company in SV. I love it in general but feel like it's pretty unlikely that I'd be able to find similar situation if I were to lose my job. It's not the best position to be in.
- orware 10y ago
  Exactly this. I live in Southern California, but not in San Diego or LA where the prevalence of some sort of other tech work might be somewhat possible. Instead I live in Imperial County (bottom right of California). Here, all of the decent paying IT work is in the County, State, Federal jobs available in the area, but this doesn't really represent Programming/Development work very well since those are even fewer amongst these organizations. There are no real private software companies and while I'd like to start something on my own and go full time down the road, there's still tons of gaps in how that would look, and potential financial risk. So where I'm at right now locally is really the best place I could be in. But...I worked at eBay in San Jose for a time and I had two coworkers, one who aws a UX guy who worked out of Austin and came into the office about once a month in San Jose, and the other was a developer who didn't want to leave Australia so they flew him in every now and again too. I really wished at the time that they could offer something similar to me, allowing me to stay down here in Imperial County (mainly to be close to family) but still get to come up to the Bay Area and work in the office every now and again (a nice mix of both worlds). On the one hand, I haven't gotten any job offers from any companies lately, but additionally I would have the same concern as jphillipsio...if for whatever reason the company that hired me and allowed me to work remotely decided to let me go...how easy would it be to get another remote job with another SV company? If that didn't pan out, what would be the likelihood of me getting anything remotely similar locally? Lot of things people have to worry about in these situations. Stability isn't always important...but it definitely becomes a big factor once you have a family or other responsibilities you can't just easily stop providing for.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    These are great points. I'd move back to small-town Florida in a heart beat. Lower cost of living, no state income tax, 1/10th of my commute time, sun year round, more land/house/space--there is a lot to love! Too much 'opportunity risk', though. If I got a job at the town's single tech company, or even that unicorn remote job, what happens when I lose it? I'll tell you what happens: I have to uproot my family and move again. Too much of a risk. So I bite my lip and continue to live in the Bay Area (and the rat race that comes with it).
amyjess 10y ago
The main reason I'd consider remote is that it's possible circumstances would force me to move out of Texas next year. If that happens, I'll be in a situation where I'd need to find both housing and a job in another city ASAP. I simply don't have the vacation time to waste travelling across the country to interview, and I have serious issues with flying anyway. It'd be much easier if I could get a job working remotely (without having to travel to interview) and then move to the town of my choice (which will almost certainly be a suburb of either LA or Chicago).

80 points by pbhowmic 10y ago

whack 10y ago

Be careful what you wish for. In a world where physical proximity no longer matters, American programmers earning 6 figures, will have to compete against programmers from South America/Europe/Asia, all of whom earn significantly less than 6 figures. There currently exists a massive salary gap between equally qualified programmers, living in different regions of the world. Eliminating the physical-proximity perks, will produce a massive regression to the mean.

ryandrake 10y ago
In other words, if your job can be done from home or from Arkansas, it can be done from India.
- jeffbush 10y ago
  I'd note that tech pundits and journalists have been saying for 20 years that many US jobs would move to India and other countries, but offshoring, while common, hasn't really made a dent in the US tech sector. It's interesting to think about why.
  - mhotchen 10y ago
    I set up an offshore team of four in India some years back. Two of the developers ended up being lackluster and let go, but two of them continued on as they were fairly decent. Even so the cultural difference was significant and it was difficult to manage them. I don't think it was their fault, they just had a very different views on what they considered was a completed task, how they went about asking for further requirements, etc. Whilst it was worth having them, there was a surprising and hidden overhead in cost for the cultural impact, as well as timezone issues. Later in my career I worked with a team from Hong Kong as well, the cultural gap was less significant and they were able to work well with the management style given. We still had timezone issues (moreso since I'm from the UK which is further from HK than from India), but because they interpreted tickets in the same way and had similar views on what the definition of done was things were far more harmonious. Communication is a huge factor in remote teams, and whilst there are lots of tools to aid it, communication styles across cultures can be very different which can cause a lot of friction.
    - whack 10y ago
      I'm guessing that none of the workers you're referring to are IIT graduates. I agree that American developers face little competition from the middle/lower end of developers in India. But the top developers in India (eg, the IIT grads and Google-India devs), in terms of raw talent and job performance, would easily out-compete the average American developer, while still being happy with a lower salary. This is where the physical-proximity-perks that American developers currently enjoy, really make a big difference.
      - mhotchen 10y ago
        Yeah these definitely weren't top tier developers. Even so I was happy with the quality of the code on the two we retained, it was everything that goes around it that I struggled with. For example they wouldn't ask questions or admit that they're struggling with something. I saw a lot of this in the interviews as well, you would ask a question like "do you know what X is" and they would say yes, but then sit in silence. So you probe "well what is it?" and they would go "I'm not completely sure" or just try to make something up. I definitely agree with you though. We interviewed one person that was exceptionally good: very experienced, good comms, ticked all the boxes. His salary expectation was around a junior dev salary in the UK, which unfortunately was too high for management who had set a budget per developer, rather than thinking it was worth hiring him and one other instead of four lukewarm devs.
      - JamesBarney 10y ago
        My understanding though is that if you're restricting yourself to top developers in India you should expect to be paying 40-80k(and rising) assuming you directly hired them. And this doesn't include setting up all of the infrastructure to hire overseas, not to mention the increased risk of operating out of two legal jurisdictions, timezone differences, and culture gaps.
    - mrfusion 10y ago
      What was the cultural issue exactly?
      - 10y ago
  - theunixbeard 10y ago
    I've always wondered why tech salaries in Western Europe were so much lower than the US (exc. Silicon Valley effect). Could it be the proximity to similiar-culture Eastern Europe where inexpensive developers are easily available?
    - Xylakant 10y ago
      Salaries in the US and Europe cannot easily be compared by the numbers alone. There are factors such as minimum PTO, health insurance, paid sick leave, pension payments, etc. that skew the bare numbers. You'll have to find an US job that has similar benefits as the european job to even be on a somewhat level ground.
      - xiaoma 10y ago
        Pension payments??? What European business or country would pay pension to an American employee just for having worked there for a few years?
        Maultasche 10y ago
        The Netherlands will pay a pension to anyone who lives there past the age of 16. You'll get more money for every year you live there. One year of living there will get you something like 18 euros a month when you retire, but it's definitely more than zero. It's giving back to someone who has lived there and (presumably) has contributed by paying taxes. Someone who as lived there all their life only gets something like 800 euro a month, so I think that it's expected that you will have other savings or an employer-provided pension in addition. I've never lived in the Netherlands, but I hear that employers there will also contribute towards a pension for an employee. This pension will be managed by some sort of private company. I'm not sure if it's a defined contribution or defined benefits pension. The details on when you get your pension and how much you get probably depend on the company that is managing it. It may be that a couple years of working will get you a very small pension or it may be that there's a minimum qualifying period. In any case, you should be able to get some benefit from it, even if it's a one-time lump sum payment.
  - theunixbeard 10y ago
    I've always wondered why tech salaries in Western Europe were so much lower than the US (exc. Silicon Valley effect). Could it be the proximity to similiar-culture Eastern Europe where inexpensive developers are easily available?
  - whack 10y ago
    I think offshoring hasn't hurt the American tech scene, for precisely the same reasons that "working in SV and living in Arkansas" is so rare. Physical proximity matters. Being able to talk and hang out with your co-workers, face-to-face, in real-time, matters. This is why top SW companies like Google, despite hiring developers around the world, still focus on having teams that are working together in the same physical office, as opposed to geographically disparate teams.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Going for the extreme cheap will also have some problems South Americans (or even Mexico) will have a smaller time zone difference, less cultural differences. Southern western Europe might be a good source of developers as well
- wmeredith 10y ago
  Eh, I've worked with teams in Arkansas and India and I'm not overly concerned. There are more barriers to collaboration than physical location. Culture and language are huge friction points when they don't align, not to mention responsiveness issues due to temporal displacement. You can just "deal with it" and your budget, codebase, and timeline will suffer. It adds a lot of overhead. Hiring a worker a timezone or two away that speaks the same language and shares a national, if not regional, culture with the rest of your team is an entirely different proposition than hiring one on the other side of the planet that speaks a different language. It CAN work, I've seen it. But I've seen it be a deal breaker much more often.
- vmarsy 10y ago
  Working from the West coast regularly with people in India, Europe,and US east coast, I disagree. You certainly have some benefits of having teams spread out around the world, as you could virtually have someone working at any hour of the day. But communication is very hard with the foreign countries, because of 2 things: time difference, and some language barriers. Even with only the 3h time difference, communication with the east coast is sometimes problematic. It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    > It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US. Or for that matter, if your QA is in India and your devs in the US need more information to investigate, that can take days... I worked at a company like that. I'd come into the office in the morning to see a ticket from a QA person in India, they didn't provide the information I needed to reproduce/investigate the bug, so I left a comment asking for it. Of course, they didn't get back to me until the middle of the night (my time), so I couldn't act on it until the next morning. And then, of course, I'd fix it, and they couldn't verify until the next night...
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      The response lag can be ameliorated to an extent by having lots of work going on in parallel so nobody is blocked on one critical reply from someone in another timezone. I've done remote development as an employee, remote development as a consultant as sole developer on a project, and local development as an employee working with other remote developers. IMO a lot of the issues people have come from inexperience with asynchronous communication. I would argue that growing up writing open source with international teams, using IRC and email lists, not only has made me appreciate remote work better, but also gave me a mindset to understand asynchronous distributed systems better, too. But it's not an insurmountable advantage; I believe any team, if it cares enough, can work effectively with remote developers, and get the morale and cost benefits of doing so.
- sanj 10y ago
  Contracts written by a US company can be enforced far more easily in Arkansas than in India.
jazzyk 10y ago
Software development is not coding only. For quite a few roles, proximity does, and will always, matter.
willholloway 10y ago
There also currently exists a massive standard of living gap between different regions of the world. Further development and economic growth will also create a leveling effect. The future standard of living and costs in China and India looks a lot like the present in the United States. As economies grow, and regulations increase (another way of saying externalities start getting priced in) the wage gap will diminish.

jaggederest 10y ago

If you draw a circle 50 miles in diameter around LA, SF, NYC, Boston, and DC: basically anywhere outside of those circles in the mainland US is pretty reasonable. It's not just the rust belt, really. You can live in Miami, Seattle or Chicago and do just fine.

Amygaz 10y ago
And I would like to add that now is the time to buy within those metropolitan area, because they are expanding, so housing in the suburb is going up.
xianshou 10y ago
You're going to have to include Seattle in the "expensive" set either now or very soon. New homes are going for millions. But other than that, agreed, just go outside the commuting range of all the major hubs and it's cheap!
ghaff 10y ago
For that matter, I live about 40 miles outside of Boston/Cambridge and housing prices are pretty reasonable. Yeah, the commute in is a pain if you work in the city (although there's decent commuter rail service). But if you don't have to work in the city (I don't), there's reasonable housing within a distance that lets you go into the city for an evening. I think some of those other locations (SF in particular) probably have a bigger radius but a lot of the angst about housing prices turns out to apply to very specific urban locales. And new grads were complaining about the price of crappy Manhattan apartments at least since the 80s.
- marchenko 10y ago
  Commuting outside of areas well-served by public transportation is a huge detriment to quality-of-life. Those extra hours really add up, especially during the shorter days of winter. The advantage of moving to a second or third city is that you can still enjoy the amenities of an urban or semi-urban setting at a lower price point. It doesn't even have to be in the Rust Belt (although personally I like Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Cleveland a great deal) - Raleigh and Charlotte are still affordable for people who like that area and climate. And there are any number of small towns in VT, NH, CO, UT, upstate NY, or central MA for the outdoorsy who don't need an urban setting

raverbashing 10y ago

So, people who build services for the internet finally found out it exists? And that if you work with github/slack/jira/several other services you already can work remotely? Really?!

sotojuan 10y ago
It's ironic that so many people build services to "connect" people over long distances and find it amazing to find out you can work over long distances.
- TarpitCarnivore 10y ago
  Ironic is applying for a job at a company building one of those services and being told they don't offer remote positions.
vram22 10y ago
Good one, and quotable :-)

zappo2938 10y ago

Don't try and establish yourself in the tech industry outside of a tech hub.

ghaff 10y ago
Do you seriously believe that glib statement? That if you don't move to the Bay area or a reasonable image of it you might as well become a fast food worker or whatever? Yes, there are certain advantages to industry job density but I actually find it rather bad advice to frame a career in tech as inherently depending upon living in a half-dozen or so cities--that can't begin to accommodate everyone.
- zappo2938 10y ago
  Yes, I strongly believe that if a person is starting in tech and not established with a reputation, they should move to a tech hub. It seems like a lot of people are going to downvote my opinion, however, I am sure that each and every person who does downvote this opinion lived in or near a tech hub when they started.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I suppose it partly depends on how broadly you define "tech hub." If that includes 20-30 places worldwide, I'm not going to violently disagree. If it means Bay Area + Portland + Seattle + ...? Then I will. Especially because "tech" isn't limited to web/social/mobile.
    - zappo2938 10y ago
      If you want to work on a yacht, you have to move to Fort Lauderdale until you are established. There is no way around it. You can be a doctor anywhere, but if you are going to do medical research you have to be in New Orleans, New York Boston, DC / Maryland, or Chicago, maybe the Cleveland Clinic. If you are Marine Biologist you are living in Woods Hole, Monterey, or La Jolla. If you are doing aerospace engineering you are going to be living in Virginia, Southern California, or Washington. It is stupid to think that someone who wants to do 'web/social/mobile' can get a decent start outside of a place without lots of other people doing it. I don't think that there is anyone on Hacker News who can say they succeeded getting their start in the industry outside of a 'software' tech hub. If someone wants to be a serious software engineer they are going to have to commit to living in SF, DC, Boston, Austin, or Portland at some point in the beginning. It is disingenuous to tell people who are starting it is otherwise. Part of the commitment of being a software engineer is living in a place with lots of other software engineers for a little while. It is not fair to anyone starting out to say they don't have to move to where there is a lot of activity. It is so unfair.

FLUX-YOU 10y ago

Personally I wouldn't be comfortable if I had to persuade them to let me work remotely to take a mortgage when the company has access to so much local talent. Maybe I'm reading that wrong, but if it wasn't an issue for them, there wouldn't be any persuasion: "Hey, can I work remote from now on?", "Sure!"

ghaff 10y ago
That's reasonable. Unless you've established yourself as an "A-lister" (whatever that means exactly) that gets to set the rules, you may not want to move somewhere there are no local opportunities. But there are gradations between back-of-beyond and unaffordable tech central.
simmons 10y ago
I seem to be one of these "work for the valley from outside the valley" types, and I, too, would be nervous taking out a mortgage in an area where I might be relying on that one job. I resisted the temptation to move to some remote mountain hamlet, and instead sought some insurance by buying a home in my favorite non-SV tech area. (Although its been 13 years since I've done any work for a local company.) Yet, I know people who do invest in the only-remote lifestyle, despite the stress when they are in between jobs. They must have nerves of steel.

toomanythings4 10y ago

In 1992, a friend got a job in the valley and I visited him when I was out there visiting the HQ for my company. He asked me to go with him to check out a condo he was thinking of buying. Remember that these are 1992 prices. The two-bedroom place we looked at was just like one of my first apartments. When the agent said it was $250K, I almost fell on the floor. My wife and I had just bought our first house, which was about three times bigger as this condo with a large front and back yard in a nice middle class neighborhood, for $80K in St. Louis. A few years ago, I saw him again. He has never owned a house but he now lives in a much nicer condo for $1.25 million. However, that condo just looks like a much nicer, updated version of that same apartment. He could have lived cheaper at an upscale, full service hotel in my town.

lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
And the difference is you're stuck living in a "nice middle class neighborhood" with a ton of space you probably don't need. For many people moving to cities the value of the area is worth many times the value of the space. I wouldn't trade my nyc studio for a McMansion back in bumfuck SC no matter how much you offered me; and I think there must be a large population that shares that sentiment.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  I haven't spent lots of time in SV, but it pretty much felt like a newer, nicer northern NJ with great weather to when I've visited. Big sea of strip malls and suburbia.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    Eh, I think that's more SoCal (LA/SD) than NorCal (SV). SoCal feels like a giant sprawling suburb with great weather, and NorCal is just cold, expensive, and full of hipsters. Like, there's a very large chance I'll end up moving to SoCal if I'm ever forced to leave Texas (which might actually happen next year), but I have no desire to live in NorCal even if you paid me seven figures.

drewg123 10y ago

I escaped a year ago & live just outside of Richmond VA now. We relocated back to the east coast to be near family, and because of my wife's career. I have to travel to the bay area at least quarterly, but it has worked out to be 6 to 7 times per year. Given no other constraints, I'd never pick Richmond, as air travel from here to SJC/SFO is not great. I'd much rather live an easy commute from a major airport with direct flights to SJC or SFO. As it is, I can drive 2 (or 4 with traffic) hours to IAD and fly direct with a decent schedule, or I can fly from RIC and change planes with a fairly lousy schedule. The cost of living is so much lower between real estate costs and state taxes that the economics are much better. The day I changed my address from Mountain View to Richmond in WorkDay was like getting a raise. Even if I was a consultant and had to pay for my own travel, the economics would still work out to be quite a better.

vvanders 10y ago
Yup, similar story here. We moved for family + get out of the city. Cost of Living was something we knew was going to be lower but man, is it lower. It takes some adjustment and I'm sure that remote work isn't for everyone but if you can find a team that it works for it really feels a bit like the future.

jeffbush 10y ago

While I've successfully managed distributed teams (and there are a number of companies that do it heavily), working remotely is not a panacea. There is definitely something to be said for face-to-face communications. People miss out on a lot of hallway conversations when they aren't in the same place. There are a lot of other tribal dynamics that come into play when you separate people, even when they're at opposite ends of the same building. Even a company like Google with global presence and an amazing proprietary internal video chat system generally discourages remote working and often defrags teams (reorganizes them so they are all in the same geography). And while it may be possible to get your current employer to let you move out of state, many employers are going to be reluctant to hire someone who is already remote and is an unknown quantity in terms of output. This potentially limits job mobility, one of the perks of living in a tech hub.

jeffbush 10y ago

I had to chuckle a little that this mentions Grand Rapids. I grew up there and moved to Silicon Valley 18 years ago. I hated it there: brutal long winters (Google "lake effect"), hot humid summers, mosquitos, and a socially conservative monoculture. I definitely understand people's frustration with the real estate situation around here, but there's more to an area than just jobs and houses.

goda90 10y ago
Some people enjoy the snow, green everywhere, no water restrictions, and less traffic. Sure mosquitos suck, but so does having everything be more expensive. There definitely is more to it than jobs and houses, so I chose to return home to the Midwest to get paid a little less(though not much in terms of cost of living) than I would at a Silicon Valley firm.
- jeffbush 10y ago
  Yeah, there are millions of people who live in the midwest who obviously disagree with me. :)
cponeill 10y ago
I also grew up in GR and moved to Seattle a little over 16 years ago. Reading the term "lake effect" cracked me up since it has been so long since I last heard it. Have you been back recently at all? Downtown has a bit more going on but wouldn't want to move back at all. Those winters are brutal.
- jeffbush 10y ago
  I haven't been back in seven years. Relatives usually come out to visit me. I'm too soft now to survive a winter there. :)
  - cponeill 10y ago
    I went back for the first time in ten years about a year ago and was surprised at how much downtown has changed. I also went back during ArtPrize which is very overwhelming. I have never seen so many people in downtown GR at one time in my life. Also, some of the new breweries there are great. But I still refuse to go back and visit during the cold months. Like you, there is no way I could survive a winter there.

epoxyhockey 10y ago

Many companies will want to adjust your salary downward if you are moving from the Bay Area to a lower cost of living location. This article seems to gloss over that fact.

jphillipsio 10y ago

I live in Michigan and work for a company in SV. I love it in general but feel like it's pretty unlikely that I'd be able to find similar situation if I were to lose my job. It's not the best position to be in.

orware 10y ago
Exactly this. I live in Southern California, but not in San Diego or LA where the prevalence of some sort of other tech work might be somewhat possible. Instead I live in Imperial County (bottom right of California). Here, all of the decent paying IT work is in the County, State, Federal jobs available in the area, but this doesn't really represent Programming/Development work very well since those are even fewer amongst these organizations. There are no real private software companies and while I'd like to start something on my own and go full time down the road, there's still tons of gaps in how that would look, and potential financial risk. So where I'm at right now locally is really the best place I could be in. But...I worked at eBay in San Jose for a time and I had two coworkers, one who aws a UX guy who worked out of Austin and came into the office about once a month in San Jose, and the other was a developer who didn't want to leave Australia so they flew him in every now and again too. I really wished at the time that they could offer something similar to me, allowing me to stay down here in Imperial County (mainly to be close to family) but still get to come up to the Bay Area and work in the office every now and again (a nice mix of both worlds). On the one hand, I haven't gotten any job offers from any companies lately, but additionally I would have the same concern as jphillipsio...if for whatever reason the company that hired me and allowed me to work remotely decided to let me go...how easy would it be to get another remote job with another SV company? If that didn't pan out, what would be the likelihood of me getting anything remotely similar locally? Lot of things people have to worry about in these situations. Stability isn't always important...but it definitely becomes a big factor once you have a family or other responsibilities you can't just easily stop providing for.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  These are great points. I'd move back to small-town Florida in a heart beat. Lower cost of living, no state income tax, 1/10th of my commute time, sun year round, more land/house/space--there is a lot to love! Too much 'opportunity risk', though. If I got a job at the town's single tech company, or even that unicorn remote job, what happens when I lose it? I'll tell you what happens: I have to uproot my family and move again. Too much of a risk. So I bite my lip and continue to live in the Bay Area (and the rat race that comes with it).

amyjess 10y ago

The main reason I'd consider remote is that it's possible circumstances would force me to move out of Texas next year. If that happens, I'll be in a situation where I'd need to find both housing and a job in another city ASAP. I simply don't have the vacation time to waste travelling across the country to interview, and I have serious issues with flying anyway. It'd be much easier if I could get a job working remotely (without having to travel to interview) and then move to the town of my choice (which will almost certainly be a suburb of either LA or Chicago).