4 ms·

It really depends on what you want to do. If programming is programming and programming is just a job, then you can do that anywhere there are programming jobs,

It really depends on what you want to do. If programming is programming and programming is just a job, then you can do that anywhere there are programming jobs, and with so many companies offering remote work, that could be anywhere. But if programming is what you intend to bring as a founder - if it's simply a means to get the burning ideas out of your head and into a product, then there's a much smaller number of places where that will work: San Francisco, Seattle, New York. You need to be able to have coffee with a VC, meet with multiple co-founder options, do a tech meetup and also spend a sizable chunk of the day coding. If you live near a small city, working that way is an impossibility. You'd have to go to the nearest big city to find that type of collaboration, and the trip will burn through all your coding time, and you still won't have the kind of quality selection that you'd get in NY or SF. As you say, hacking the rent-salary ratio, which is what the article is about, should be a much smaller factor in how you decide where to live.

mooreds 10y ago
> you need to be able to have coffee with a VC If you are building a company that needs VC funding. Most companies don't. "Venture Capital is the wrong source of capital for the vast majority of entrepreneurial ventures" http://avc.com/2005/03/dont_take_the_m/ http://avc.com/2005/03/dont_take_the_m/ If you aren't looking to raise VC but instead want to be part of a vibrant tech ecosystem, well, that opens up more mid tier cities. For starters: San Diego, LA, Boulder, Austin, Portland, Pittsburgh(?) in the USA.
- eganist 10y ago
  Adding one: if you're doing anything security related, DC's your friend.
  - mooreds 10y ago
    Good point! And if you are into oil/gas, Houston. Marijuana, Colorado or Washington. Cars, Detroit (maybe?). Commodities, Chicago. Ag, Kansas City (maybe?). Outdoor experiences, SLC. Building something for Latin America, Miami. Ets, etc. I imagine there are many other cities that dominate in niches that I'm missing.
    - estsauver 10y ago
      St. Louis tends to be one of the best cities for Ag stuff.
    - heneryville 10y ago
      For the ignorant, what's AG? Google isn't helping.
      - herdrick 10y ago
        Agriculture.
      - vram22 10y ago
        Someone should tell Google (hey googlers on here) to add that case to the search engine's special cases, as in: "Did you mean agriculture or (the chemical symbol for) silver [1] or ..." :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver
    - chaoticgeek 10y ago
      I live in the Detroit suburbs. Can confirm many programmers working for auto companies around here and friends with a few.
- krenoten 10y ago
  I've been far happier as an engineer in NYC and Berlin than SF. Gentrification has made SF a pretty boring place to be, and I felt that my overall sense of creativity plummeted there when I was surrounded by so few people from different backgrounds.
  - westoncb 10y ago
    Agreed. I ended up moving across the bay and living in Berkeley while working in SF just for that reason.
  - ido 10y ago
    It's kinda funny though, as people in Berlin at least (I'm sure in NYC too) are constantly complaining about gentrification too :)
  - pascalxus 10y ago
    I don't think there's nearly as much gentrification as people say there is, overall. I mean sure, there's a huge amount of gentrification in the 20% of SF that is not rent controlled: there only the super rich can live. But, as for the other 80% that's rent controlled, lots of it is pretty dilapidated, almost borderline 3rd world country in some parts. 1% (7k people) of the SF population is homeless and even more are nearly there (despite over 240 million$ a year spent fighting homelessness). Perhaps the reason people find SF boring is due to the hollowing out of the middle class.
sporkenfang 10y ago
What if I'm working on a side project, don't want VC funding (or any sort of loans), and just want to build organically? I can find people who can program and can program well in almost any place on the planet. There are a shitload of Russians and Chinese cleaning up at things in the software engineering domain. There are a shitload of people writing all kinds of good and bad code everywhere. Even if I wanted to found a startup in Nowhere, Saskatchewan I could, particularly since there are plenty of folks who will work remotely and maybe a few locals who are good as well. San Francisco is a place. Engineering talent is available everywhere, though perhaps most places it isn't so much fish jumping onto the line as in the Bay Area. What about all the nerds who are Polish, Portuguese, and Peruvian and choose to remain local because their spouses, children, and other interests are? They can still code, some of them are definitely brilliant, and they can either work locally or (more likely) remotely. Starting a "startup" with venture capital might be next to impossible in Peru, for all I know, but a hell of a lot of folks don't want to exit, don't want to dilute their ownership of their product, and frankly like the environs elsewhere.
- komali2 10y ago
  If you can afford to pay a couple Chinese programmers this isn't a bad idea. You run the risk of your code just vanishing and a eerily similar Chinese product appearing a few months later, but depending on your financial situation you can be a sole funder in that case. Not that I have anything against using out of country programmers, but it's a fact that China does not strongly enforce copyright and does not go out of its way to protect foreign businesses. I don't know about Russia, India, South America, etc, I'd be curious about anybody that's done this sort of thing before. Tim Ferris always talks about it for things like running his support and returns and whatnot.
  - fraculto09 10y ago
    You can just choose countries with Western culture that didn't have too much luck economy-wise in the recent years, but have stable states and law. That usually means Central/Eastern Europe: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and so on. Avoid Belarus, Ukraine and others with heavy eastern influences (a rule of thumb: if they use Latin alphabet, there's a good chance that it's safe).

mooreds 10y ago

> you need to be able to have coffee with a VC If you are building a company that needs VC funding. Most companies don't. "Venture Capital is the wrong source of capital for the vast majority of entrepreneurial ventures" http://avc.com/2005/03/dont_take_the_m/ http://avc.com/2005/03/dont_take_the_m/ If you aren't looking to raise VC but instead want to be part of a vibrant tech ecosystem, well, that opens up more mid tier cities. For starters: San Diego, LA, Boulder, Austin, Portland, Pittsburgh(?) in the USA.

eganist 10y ago
Adding one: if you're doing anything security related, DC's your friend.
- mooreds 10y ago
  Good point! And if you are into oil/gas, Houston. Marijuana, Colorado or Washington. Cars, Detroit (maybe?). Commodities, Chicago. Ag, Kansas City (maybe?). Outdoor experiences, SLC. Building something for Latin America, Miami. Ets, etc. I imagine there are many other cities that dominate in niches that I'm missing.
  - estsauver 10y ago
    St. Louis tends to be one of the best cities for Ag stuff.
  - heneryville 10y ago
    For the ignorant, what's AG? Google isn't helping.
    - herdrick 10y ago
      Agriculture.
    - vram22 10y ago
      Someone should tell Google (hey googlers on here) to add that case to the search engine's special cases, as in: "Did you mean agriculture or (the chemical symbol for) silver [1] or ..." :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver
  - chaoticgeek 10y ago
    I live in the Detroit suburbs. Can confirm many programmers working for auto companies around here and friends with a few.
krenoten 10y ago
I've been far happier as an engineer in NYC and Berlin than SF. Gentrification has made SF a pretty boring place to be, and I felt that my overall sense of creativity plummeted there when I was surrounded by so few people from different backgrounds.
- westoncb 10y ago
  Agreed. I ended up moving across the bay and living in Berkeley while working in SF just for that reason.
- ido 10y ago
  It's kinda funny though, as people in Berlin at least (I'm sure in NYC too) are constantly complaining about gentrification too :)
- pascalxus 10y ago
  I don't think there's nearly as much gentrification as people say there is, overall. I mean sure, there's a huge amount of gentrification in the 20% of SF that is not rent controlled: there only the super rich can live. But, as for the other 80% that's rent controlled, lots of it is pretty dilapidated, almost borderline 3rd world country in some parts. 1% (7k people) of the SF population is homeless and even more are nearly there (despite over 240 million$ a year spent fighting homelessness). Perhaps the reason people find SF boring is due to the hollowing out of the middle class.

sporkenfang 10y ago

What if I'm working on a side project, don't want VC funding (or any sort of loans), and just want to build organically? I can find people who can program and can program well in almost any place on the planet. There are a shitload of Russians and Chinese cleaning up at things in the software engineering domain. There are a shitload of people writing all kinds of good and bad code everywhere. Even if I wanted to found a startup in Nowhere, Saskatchewan I could, particularly since there are plenty of folks who will work remotely and maybe a few locals who are good as well. San Francisco is a place. Engineering talent is available everywhere, though perhaps most places it isn't so much fish jumping onto the line as in the Bay Area. What about all the nerds who are Polish, Portuguese, and Peruvian and choose to remain local because their spouses, children, and other interests are? They can still code, some of them are definitely brilliant, and they can either work locally or (more likely) remotely. Starting a "startup" with venture capital might be next to impossible in Peru, for all I know, but a hell of a lot of folks don't want to exit, don't want to dilute their ownership of their product, and frankly like the environs elsewhere.

komali2 10y ago
If you can afford to pay a couple Chinese programmers this isn't a bad idea. You run the risk of your code just vanishing and a eerily similar Chinese product appearing a few months later, but depending on your financial situation you can be a sole funder in that case. Not that I have anything against using out of country programmers, but it's a fact that China does not strongly enforce copyright and does not go out of its way to protect foreign businesses. I don't know about Russia, India, South America, etc, I'd be curious about anybody that's done this sort of thing before. Tim Ferris always talks about it for things like running his support and returns and whatnot.
- fraculto09 10y ago
  You can just choose countries with Western culture that didn't have too much luck economy-wise in the recent years, but have stable states and law. That usually means Central/Eastern Europe: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and so on. Avoid Belarus, Ukraine and others with heavy eastern influences (a rule of thumb: if they use Latin alphabet, there's a good chance that it's safe).