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> For all sorts of reasons, New Zealand suddenly makes sense. The cost of living is less than in San Francisco. Commuting is less wearying. And American politic

> For all sorts of reasons, New Zealand suddenly makes sense. The cost of living is less than in San Francisco. Commuting is less wearying. And American politics, “Brexit” and the Islamic State are on the other side of the world. For the most part, this is all true in, say, Tulsa. Especially if you stay off Facebook. You especially don't have to go to New Zealand to find a cheaper, commuter-friendly place to work. Nothing against New Zealand. I'm sure it's a great place to live. The writing in the article is just sloppy.

ryandrake 10y ago
But, like Tulsa, I'd be worried about what happens when that tech company, which I moved myself and my family halfway around the world for, goes under and I'm out of work. I'm sure there is more than one tech company in Auckland, but how many? And how many of those will want to hire me? And out of those how many will I want to work for? And out of those, how many will pay enough where it makes sense for me to stay? Those questions have to be raised outside of tech hubs. I used to live in a very low cost of living area in Florida. I'd go back in a heartbeat, but guess what, there was literally one company within a 100 mile (probably 200 mile) radius hiring software people like me. That's too damn risky.
- flexie 10y ago
  Wouldn't most tech guys be able to support a family working for any of the local web developers, app developers or IT departments of non tech companies that you find all over Florida, New Zealand and most of the Western world? In urban areas of Florida and New Zealand you will find these jobs everywhere within a 5 mile radius. Maybe not always so interesting or well paying as some jobs in IT corporations, but good to have as a plan b. $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley.
  - theparanoid 10y ago
    Working in a software company is qualitatively different than working in an IT department. One of them gets first dibs on dual monitor desktops. The other is cost center.
  - mywittyname 10y ago
    > $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley. No, it's really not -- it's actually more like $77,000[1]. With the bulk of the difference being driven by housing prices. And $77,000 is actually above the average salary for a SE in Ft. Lauderdale (according to Glassdoor: $73,000). [1] http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-living-calculator.aspx http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
    - besogno 10y ago
      The average income of a programmer is as relevant as the average income of a musician. It will not tell you anything about how much Lady Gaga makes, or the fact that the richest man in the world is a programmer. This kind of averages could possibly be relevant for bricklayers, but even in that case I doubt it.
      - ryandrake 10y ago
        Lady Gaga's wealth/success is about as relevant to a musician as Bill Gates's is to a software engineer. The averages are very relevant.
        pilom 10y ago
        The GP's point is that Median Income would be valuable but "average" i.e. Mean Income, is much less valuable.
        mywittyname 10y ago
        The according to the BLS, the median wage nationally is $100,080 and the average is $104,300. I'm not convinced a 4% difference takes away a whole lot of value, especially when salaries are close to a normal distribution. I'm willing to bet that as you limit you data set to a smaller region, salaries normalize even further.
        user5994461 10y ago
  - sampo 10y ago
    > Wouldn't most tech guys be able to support a family working for any of the local web developers, app developers or IT departments of non tech companies that you find all over Florida, New Zealand and most of the Western world? Probably, but doing menial tasks behind where the modern edge progresses in technologies, your skills would become obsolete in 5-10 years. You'd either need to proceed to a general managerial path in your chosen no-name company, or devote time for self-study to stay in touch with the fashionable technologies.
    - gcb0 10y ago
      you mean, like any fortune 500 company in the US?
    - abalashov 10y ago
      What I have found is that this is often made up for by the arbitrage opportunities! Because traditional industries are so out of touch with the latest hipster trends, giving them just a little taste (calibrated to appear as bottom line-relevant as possible to the right stakeholders) can make you seem like the second coming of Jesus, get you massive raises and promotions, and make you essentially layoff proof. I remember I had a job in 2006 - where I was a low-grade operations nobody - and I prototyped something in client-side JS for an internal project. Overnight I became Master Sensei, and everyone in engineering (not my division) knew my name. They were mortified when I tendered my resignation. It doesn't always work. Megacorps don't intrinsically care about new technologies for their own sake, and it is true that defending the value of engineering to a bunch of greying MBAs in financial services or retail can be demoralising, at times infuriating or heartbreaking. Sometimes this type of activity can be consigned to skunkworks that never get a hearing or see the light of day, whether for political reasons (you're infringing on the J2EE guys' turf) or because management isn't tech-savvy enough to understand the value. But man, when it works, it works! I'm in telecom, and much of the industry - by the numbers, forget Twilio and WebRTC - operates according to soul-deadening customs that have changed little since the 80s and the advent of the micro-computer. Core routing tables and key provisioning databases are still distributed as giant spreadsheets and Access databases. Cable companies can be surprisingly low-tech, too. I've seen what happens when one becomes their connection to spiffy, modern innovation techniques like regular expressions and Python ETL jobs. The threshold for mind-blowing Bushido is startlingly low in enterprise. That can really make you an A-player in their eyes. Your main competition is going to be that these companies prefer to source such insights from giant professional services companies and consultancies, who can be similarly low-tech, but some of whom have realised there's enormous money to be made in opening large companies' eyes to 2003-era technology like Perl and Subversion. There's also the fact that big companies don't like the risk profile of depending on one guy or a small team to do advanced stuff. They'd rather spend millions of dollars to have it done mediocrely by Accenture or Deloitte, in the customarily obese enterprise fashion, skies darkened with "Linux resources" and the Sun eclipsed by UML diagrams and process maps. The other main danger is, as you allude, falling behind because the threshold for being ahead of the curve is so low. If you show them screen scraping or write an internal portal in a modern JS framework, they'll think you're from the future. Then you get into an actual tech company job and realise you've become an entrenched maintenance specialist in some decade-old stuff.
  - FungalRaincloud 10y ago
    I mean, it's plausible that we could make enough to get by doing work that isn't fulfilling. Building websites for local churches, for example, can pay well enough to at least keep the lights on, and there's plenty of that sort of work. Trouble is, it can be career killing to be out of the game for a few months, especially if web dev is not what you want to be doing.
    - ericd 10y ago
      Being out of work for a few months isn't career killing. There may be some correlation, but it's not causal - I know plenty of people who've chosen not to work for a few months that I'd hire in a heartbeat. They do generally work on interesting projects, though.
      - FungalRaincloud 10y ago
        It's not the time off, but rather, how you fill that time off that I am arguing is career stunting. If you have to work on uninteresting, non-career aiding work for a few months to make ends meet, you aren't likely to be working on interesting projects during that time. e: changed killing to stunting, because I do believe that it is recoverable.
        ericd 10y ago
        I don't think it's that dire, but I guess interviewing afterwards could be trickier. If you were still a good programmer after three months, I think you'd be just fine. I just took six months off to travel the world, I'm not worried.
    - eropple 10y ago
      I regularly take three months off to Not Do Work and have yet to have a single problem picking up new work. Some envy, but no problems.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Others have also replied but yea: with all due respect to IT helpdesk support staff and Wordpress maintainers and the guy who does the web site for the local nail salon, there's no way any of that compares to a career in software. Living in a low cost of living area is nice but it's not worth that.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      Those aren't the only jobs in low-cost areas. Almost every mid-size or larger company has an internal software group making real software, and every metropolitan area has at least several of these. Lots of that is on older "enterprise" stacks v. cool open-source or experimental stacks, but it's still a plenty legitimate career path, and you'd be surprised how modern a company that looks like a dinosaur at first glance can be when you look a little deeper. Example: Walmart runs lots of stuff on Node.js. If you want to slave away in a startup, then yeah, you're probably going to want to be in SF, SEA, or NYC. If you want a long-term job at a stable employer where most people don't take themselves too seriously, overtime is rarely or never expected, and you work with a bunch of smart, established people (even if they're a bit change averse), there is plenty of opportunity outside of the tech hubs. And on salary, the average may be an OK guideline but it is by no means the top of the market. Lots of good people will hire in at 1.5-2x the area's average.
      - ryandrake 10y ago
        > Those aren't the only jobs in low-cost areas. Almost every mid-size or larger company has an internal software group making real software, and every metropolitan area has at least several of these. Having one company in an area does not help. My original comment dealt with the risk of when that one company doesn't work out for whatever reason. If that's the only tech employer in the area, you're screwed. Even if there are a few in the area, getting a tech job is not like getting a job at the local Starbucks. One could easily apply to all 20 companies in the area and not get anywhere. Ask me how I know. At least in the Bay Area, you could apply to 20 companies a week and not run out of potential opportunities.
        10y ago
  - sidlls 10y ago
    > $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley. Not really. The quality of life on just about any axis, from parks and recreation to culture to education in Ft. Lauderdale is just inferior. Also, $50k doesn't go as far as you think there. There are a number of day-to-day and intangible costs (e.g. commute) that are actually less expensive in the valley.
    - will_brown 10y ago
      "Quality of life" is inferior on any axis? Fort Lauderdale is the Yatch Capital of the World, the intercostal are a billionaire playground. Name any activity on the water from recreation, fishing, diving, to bio research...SV isn't on the map. On the other extreme - absolutely free - I would take Fort Lauderdale Beach and the weather over anything SV has to offer. After all there was a move to totally relocate Hollywood movie industry from CA to South Florida. And parks? What measure does SV outperform? Everglades National Park is probably 4-5x larger than SV and it's in Fort Lauderdale's backyard. Though South Florida doesn't get the tech press, we also have billion dollar startups. As far as schools, I went to a public high school (top 50 in the US) not even the best rated public school in my area, but my 4 brothers and I all have graduate degrees, fellow alumni include astronauts, countless professional athletes and even a tech founder by the name Jeff Bezos. I won't touch culture, because it is much to loaded but there is no shortage of meuseums dedicated to arts and sciences. Come to Wynwood during Art Basel and you might leave thinking we have the most progressive city in the world artistically. Finally, I don't want to minimize the diversity of the SV demographics but it again doesn't compete with the diversity and actual cultural influence these various background have in South Florida.
      - self-diversity 10y ago
        If you aren't aware, there is abundant outdoor activity including water recreation in the bay area. You seem to think we have to stay in the valley
        will_brown 10y ago
        No doubt, but OP is saying nothing in Fort Lauderdale (our "Salt Life") is on axis with SV, With a fair reading I didn't claim the same. Florida keys and Caribbean are Home to the 3rd and 4th largest reefs in the world, so at minimum we can agree it's on the same axis as SV's quality of water activity.
- EdwardDiego 10y ago
  There's plenty in Auckland, Wellington, a lesser amount but still a healthy amount in Christchurch, and a few in Dunedin. http://seek.co.nz http://seek.co.nz to get an idea. The developer of DayZ has set up a gaming studio in Dunedin, but it's still pretty sparse down there.
  - incompatible 10y ago
    I'd be wary of Wellington just because of the terrible climate and the earthquake risk. That place will likely become a complete disaster area some day.
    - isostatic 10y ago
      Yeah, but Sam Francisco will always be immune from earthquakes
      - incompatible 10y ago
        There are other places in the world besides Wellington and San Francisco. The risk in Wellington is actually very high. It has its own version of the San Francisco earthquake in 1855, although a bit stronger. That earthquake uplifted quite a bit of land from the harbour which is now part of the CBD. That land is considered unstable, but has been built up with high-rise buildings. There's also a major fault line running right through the city, and the hilly landscape makes it vulnerable to landslides and road cut-offs. I'm surprised I got down-voted for mentioning it, but people are complacent I suppose.
sjg007 10y ago
It's more liberal and has better social services and you get health care in NZ. Plus amazing outdoor activities.
- lacampbell 10y ago
  It's more liberal For me that's a huge downside. The leftism here is stifling.
magic_beans 10y ago
Agreed. This feels a lot like a submarine article. For people in the US, it would be way easier to just relocate from SV to middle America. Or even just to other parts of California. New Zealand does look absolutely stunning, though. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- mattnewton 10y ago
  How is that hiding from American politics?
  - hamandcheese 10y ago
    Easy: don't watch the news.
    - tonmoy 10y ago
      When they won't let me come in the US at the border after visiting a different country, not watching the new will be very helpful indeed
      - hamandcheese 10y ago
        GP said relocate to middle America.
        sampo 10y ago
        Even if you relocate to Colorado, Kansas, whatever, one occasionally needs to travel to other countries, no?
        clarkm 10y ago
        Most Americans don't have a passport and have never left the country.
zumu 10y ago
> For the most part, this is all true in, say, Woah woah woah, as someone who used to live in Tulsa, don't even joke. It is easily one of the most aggressively conservative and corrupt cities in the US.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  Given these comments in this thread, not just this one, I must have missed some dog whistle where this was a pitch to liberal engineers that can't afford San Fransisco anymore. Anyway, I picked a medium-small city arbitrarily. Look at Lawrence, Kansas or Bloomington, IN then. They each have big state universities in town. Or Eugene, OR.
gdulli 10y ago
Conflating politics with what shows up in your Facebook feed is how we got into this mess.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  Agreed. I've just observed that the really agitated people tend to agitate themselves more than their environment does. Social media being an obvious example.
rconti 10y ago
Plus, you'd be further from Peter Thiel.
- indemnity 10y ago
  You know Peter Thiel has New Zealand citizenship, right? And owns a massive bolthole ranch on the South Island should things turn pear shaped.
mistermann 10y ago
> Especially if you stay off Facebook. And stop talking to people. What you're saying, at least in a sense, is there's no cultural difference between the two places.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 10y ago
Yes but New Zealand is much less likely to ever be bombed flat than Tulsa is. Discovering the reasons for this is left as an exercise for the reader.
stevenwoo 10y ago
Staying off of Facebook doesn't insulate someone if they are not caucasian. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/24/shooting-of-2-indians-in-us-bar-sends-shock-waves-in-india/ http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/24/shooting-of-2-indians-... I don't know if you know this, but large swaths of America were so unsafe to travel for African Americans for a long time after slavery ended, that a guidebook was created specifically for the purpose of avoiding the most dangerous areas. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/green-book-helped-keep-african-americans-safe-on-the-road/ http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/green-book-helped-ke...
- Banthum 10y ago
  I'll believe immigrants' revealed preferences. Clearly they prefer living around those horrible white people to living around their own people in their own country. And - Good thing none of us have a time portal to 1954.
- self-diversity 10y ago
  I'm having a hard time drawing a connection between your opening sentence and literally anything else in your post. Did you forget to factor in the passage of decades?
  - albemuth 10y ago
    The events on the first link happened this year. Also, BLM.
Apocryphon 10y ago
When I think of NZ, I imagine South Pacific beaches, lush forests of emu and kiwi and other exotic animals, and the landscape of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. What natural beauty does Tulsa have?
- antod 10y ago
  You're selling Tulsa short - it has the same number of wild emus as NZ does.
  - tomrod 10y ago
    Hilarious!
- tomrod 10y ago
  Amazing sunsets, beautiful prairie flowers, some caves. Cheap access to beef, often. Delicious peaches. Don't knock Tulsa, it's not some hell hole.
- EdwardDiego 10y ago
  Looks like our tourism marketing campaigns are paying off, although emus are Australian, we had moa, but they're extinct now. Not pictured in the tourism campaigns - our vast reliance on agriculture.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    Is it really a bad thing? When I see "vast reliance on agriculture", or, say, "net exporter of agricultural products", I read it as "self-sufficient country that can feed itself even in troubled times". If anything, this sort of thing might command a premium in the current environment.
    - EdwardDiego 10y ago
      No, but it's not as pretty as the stuff in LOTR. And the pollution problems caused by the massive conversion to dairy over the last 20 years is becoming a big issue - turns out New Zealanders like being able to swim in their rivers and lakes.
RantyDave 10y ago
Houses in New Zealand are mad expensive. Auckland (for instance) now has an average house price over $1M, about $700k US. It is, I believe, the fourth least affordable housing market in the world after Hong Kong, Sydney and Vancouver.
- marssaxman 10y ago
  Looks like the Auckland median price is NZ$890K, which is roughly US$623K. Here in Seattle, the median price just hit US$700K... Auckland doesn't sound so bad!
  - rjgray 10y ago
    In terms of affordability, you'd need to look at average salaries as well. My impression is that Auckland doesn't fare so well on that front.
    - lazyasciiart 10y ago
      Yes, Auckland rates much worse than Seattle (and most of the world) in that comparison - http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf (Auckland has a median house:median salary ratio of 10.0, Seattle is 5.5)
  - taysic 10y ago
    If its anything like Sydney, Australia then you should look at the quality of the houses too - not just the median house price. I remember looking at houses in Sydney and given the size, quality, and look they would cost half as much here in the Bay area. They can be tiny, tiny even for our standards and cost over 1 mil.
  - RantyDave 10y ago
    https://www.qv.co.nz/property-trends/residential-house-values https://www.qv.co.nz/property-trends/residential-house-value...
  - lacampbell 10y ago

ryandrake 10y ago

But, like Tulsa, I'd be worried about what happens when that tech company, which I moved myself and my family halfway around the world for, goes under and I'm out of work. I'm sure there is more than one tech company in Auckland, but how many? And how many of those will want to hire me? And out of those how many will I want to work for? And out of those, how many will pay enough where it makes sense for me to stay? Those questions have to be raised outside of tech hubs. I used to live in a very low cost of living area in Florida. I'd go back in a heartbeat, but guess what, there was literally one company within a 100 mile (probably 200 mile) radius hiring software people like me. That's too damn risky.

flexie 10y ago
Wouldn't most tech guys be able to support a family working for any of the local web developers, app developers or IT departments of non tech companies that you find all over Florida, New Zealand and most of the Western world? In urban areas of Florida and New Zealand you will find these jobs everywhere within a 5 mile radius. Maybe not always so interesting or well paying as some jobs in IT corporations, but good to have as a plan b. $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley.
- theparanoid 10y ago
  Working in a software company is qualitatively different than working in an IT department. One of them gets first dibs on dual monitor desktops. The other is cost center.
- mywittyname 10y ago
  > $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley. No, it's really not -- it's actually more like $77,000[1]. With the bulk of the difference being driven by housing prices. And $77,000 is actually above the average salary for a SE in Ft. Lauderdale (according to Glassdoor: $73,000). [1] http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-living-calculator.aspx http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
  - besogno 10y ago
    The average income of a programmer is as relevant as the average income of a musician. It will not tell you anything about how much Lady Gaga makes, or the fact that the richest man in the world is a programmer. This kind of averages could possibly be relevant for bricklayers, but even in that case I doubt it.
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      Lady Gaga's wealth/success is about as relevant to a musician as Bill Gates's is to a software engineer. The averages are very relevant.
      - pilom 10y ago
        The GP's point is that Median Income would be valuable but "average" i.e. Mean Income, is much less valuable.
        mywittyname 10y ago
        The according to the BLS, the median wage nationally is $100,080 and the average is $104,300. I'm not convinced a 4% difference takes away a whole lot of value, especially when salaries are close to a normal distribution. I'm willing to bet that as you limit you data set to a smaller region, salaries normalize even further.
        user5994461 10y ago
- sampo 10y ago
  > Wouldn't most tech guys be able to support a family working for any of the local web developers, app developers or IT departments of non tech companies that you find all over Florida, New Zealand and most of the Western world? Probably, but doing menial tasks behind where the modern edge progresses in technologies, your skills would become obsolete in 5-10 years. You'd either need to proceed to a general managerial path in your chosen no-name company, or devote time for self-study to stay in touch with the fashionable technologies.
  - gcb0 10y ago
    you mean, like any fortune 500 company in the US?
  - abalashov 10y ago
    What I have found is that this is often made up for by the arbitrage opportunities! Because traditional industries are so out of touch with the latest hipster trends, giving them just a little taste (calibrated to appear as bottom line-relevant as possible to the right stakeholders) can make you seem like the second coming of Jesus, get you massive raises and promotions, and make you essentially layoff proof. I remember I had a job in 2006 - where I was a low-grade operations nobody - and I prototyped something in client-side JS for an internal project. Overnight I became Master Sensei, and everyone in engineering (not my division) knew my name. They were mortified when I tendered my resignation. It doesn't always work. Megacorps don't intrinsically care about new technologies for their own sake, and it is true that defending the value of engineering to a bunch of greying MBAs in financial services or retail can be demoralising, at times infuriating or heartbreaking. Sometimes this type of activity can be consigned to skunkworks that never get a hearing or see the light of day, whether for political reasons (you're infringing on the J2EE guys' turf) or because management isn't tech-savvy enough to understand the value. But man, when it works, it works! I'm in telecom, and much of the industry - by the numbers, forget Twilio and WebRTC - operates according to soul-deadening customs that have changed little since the 80s and the advent of the micro-computer. Core routing tables and key provisioning databases are still distributed as giant spreadsheets and Access databases. Cable companies can be surprisingly low-tech, too. I've seen what happens when one becomes their connection to spiffy, modern innovation techniques like regular expressions and Python ETL jobs. The threshold for mind-blowing Bushido is startlingly low in enterprise. That can really make you an A-player in their eyes. Your main competition is going to be that these companies prefer to source such insights from giant professional services companies and consultancies, who can be similarly low-tech, but some of whom have realised there's enormous money to be made in opening large companies' eyes to 2003-era technology like Perl and Subversion. There's also the fact that big companies don't like the risk profile of depending on one guy or a small team to do advanced stuff. They'd rather spend millions of dollars to have it done mediocrely by Accenture or Deloitte, in the customarily obese enterprise fashion, skies darkened with "Linux resources" and the Sun eclipsed by UML diagrams and process maps. The other main danger is, as you allude, falling behind because the threshold for being ahead of the curve is so low. If you show them screen scraping or write an internal portal in a modern JS framework, they'll think you're from the future. Then you get into an actual tech company job and realise you've become an entrenched maintenance specialist in some decade-old stuff.
- FungalRaincloud 10y ago
  I mean, it's plausible that we could make enough to get by doing work that isn't fulfilling. Building websites for local churches, for example, can pay well enough to at least keep the lights on, and there's plenty of that sort of work. Trouble is, it can be career killing to be out of the game for a few months, especially if web dev is not what you want to be doing.
  - ericd 10y ago
    Being out of work for a few months isn't career killing. There may be some correlation, but it's not causal - I know plenty of people who've chosen not to work for a few months that I'd hire in a heartbeat. They do generally work on interesting projects, though.
    - FungalRaincloud 10y ago
      It's not the time off, but rather, how you fill that time off that I am arguing is career stunting. If you have to work on uninteresting, non-career aiding work for a few months to make ends meet, you aren't likely to be working on interesting projects during that time. e: changed killing to stunting, because I do believe that it is recoverable.
      - ericd 10y ago
        I don't think it's that dire, but I guess interviewing afterwards could be trickier. If you were still a good programmer after three months, I think you'd be just fine. I just took six months off to travel the world, I'm not worried.
  - eropple 10y ago
    I regularly take three months off to Not Do Work and have yet to have a single problem picking up new work. Some envy, but no problems.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Others have also replied but yea: with all due respect to IT helpdesk support staff and Wordpress maintainers and the guy who does the web site for the local nail salon, there's no way any of that compares to a career in software. Living in a low cost of living area is nice but it's not worth that.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Those aren't the only jobs in low-cost areas. Almost every mid-size or larger company has an internal software group making real software, and every metropolitan area has at least several of these. Lots of that is on older "enterprise" stacks v. cool open-source or experimental stacks, but it's still a plenty legitimate career path, and you'd be surprised how modern a company that looks like a dinosaur at first glance can be when you look a little deeper. Example: Walmart runs lots of stuff on Node.js. If you want to slave away in a startup, then yeah, you're probably going to want to be in SF, SEA, or NYC. If you want a long-term job at a stable employer where most people don't take themselves too seriously, overtime is rarely or never expected, and you work with a bunch of smart, established people (even if they're a bit change averse), there is plenty of opportunity outside of the tech hubs. And on salary, the average may be an OK guideline but it is by no means the top of the market. Lots of good people will hire in at 1.5-2x the area's average.
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      > Those aren't the only jobs in low-cost areas. Almost every mid-size or larger company has an internal software group making real software, and every metropolitan area has at least several of these. Having one company in an area does not help. My original comment dealt with the risk of when that one company doesn't work out for whatever reason. If that's the only tech employer in the area, you're screwed. Even if there are a few in the area, getting a tech job is not like getting a job at the local Starbucks. One could easily apply to all 20 companies in the area and not get anywhere. Ask me how I know. At least in the Bay Area, you could apply to 20 companies a week and not run out of potential opportunities.
      - 10y ago
- sidlls 10y ago
  > $50,000 in Fort Lauderdale is as good as $120,000 in the valley. Not really. The quality of life on just about any axis, from parks and recreation to culture to education in Ft. Lauderdale is just inferior. Also, $50k doesn't go as far as you think there. There are a number of day-to-day and intangible costs (e.g. commute) that are actually less expensive in the valley.
  - will_brown 10y ago
    "Quality of life" is inferior on any axis? Fort Lauderdale is the Yatch Capital of the World, the intercostal are a billionaire playground. Name any activity on the water from recreation, fishing, diving, to bio research...SV isn't on the map. On the other extreme - absolutely free - I would take Fort Lauderdale Beach and the weather over anything SV has to offer. After all there was a move to totally relocate Hollywood movie industry from CA to South Florida. And parks? What measure does SV outperform? Everglades National Park is probably 4-5x larger than SV and it's in Fort Lauderdale's backyard. Though South Florida doesn't get the tech press, we also have billion dollar startups. As far as schools, I went to a public high school (top 50 in the US) not even the best rated public school in my area, but my 4 brothers and I all have graduate degrees, fellow alumni include astronauts, countless professional athletes and even a tech founder by the name Jeff Bezos. I won't touch culture, because it is much to loaded but there is no shortage of meuseums dedicated to arts and sciences. Come to Wynwood during Art Basel and you might leave thinking we have the most progressive city in the world artistically. Finally, I don't want to minimize the diversity of the SV demographics but it again doesn't compete with the diversity and actual cultural influence these various background have in South Florida.
    - self-diversity 10y ago
      If you aren't aware, there is abundant outdoor activity including water recreation in the bay area. You seem to think we have to stay in the valley
      - will_brown 10y ago
        No doubt, but OP is saying nothing in Fort Lauderdale (our "Salt Life") is on axis with SV, With a fair reading I didn't claim the same. Florida keys and Caribbean are Home to the 3rd and 4th largest reefs in the world, so at minimum we can agree it's on the same axis as SV's quality of water activity.
EdwardDiego 10y ago
There's plenty in Auckland, Wellington, a lesser amount but still a healthy amount in Christchurch, and a few in Dunedin. http://seek.co.nz http://seek.co.nz to get an idea. The developer of DayZ has set up a gaming studio in Dunedin, but it's still pretty sparse down there.
- incompatible 10y ago
  I'd be wary of Wellington just because of the terrible climate and the earthquake risk. That place will likely become a complete disaster area some day.
  - isostatic 10y ago
    Yeah, but Sam Francisco will always be immune from earthquakes
    - incompatible 10y ago
      There are other places in the world besides Wellington and San Francisco. The risk in Wellington is actually very high. It has its own version of the San Francisco earthquake in 1855, although a bit stronger. That earthquake uplifted quite a bit of land from the harbour which is now part of the CBD. That land is considered unstable, but has been built up with high-rise buildings. There's also a major fault line running right through the city, and the hilly landscape makes it vulnerable to landslides and road cut-offs. I'm surprised I got down-voted for mentioning it, but people are complacent I suppose.

sjg007 10y ago

It's more liberal and has better social services and you get health care in NZ. Plus amazing outdoor activities.

lacampbell 10y ago
It's more liberal For me that's a huge downside. The leftism here is stifling.

magic_beans 10y ago

Agreed. This feels a lot like a submarine article. For people in the US, it would be way easier to just relocate from SV to middle America. Or even just to other parts of California. New Zealand does look absolutely stunning, though. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

mattnewton 10y ago
How is that hiding from American politics?
- hamandcheese 10y ago
  Easy: don't watch the news.
  - tonmoy 10y ago
    When they won't let me come in the US at the border after visiting a different country, not watching the new will be very helpful indeed
    - hamandcheese 10y ago
      GP said relocate to middle America.
      - sampo 10y ago
        Even if you relocate to Colorado, Kansas, whatever, one occasionally needs to travel to other countries, no?
        clarkm 10y ago
        Most Americans don't have a passport and have never left the country.

zumu 10y ago

> For the most part, this is all true in, say, Woah woah woah, as someone who used to live in Tulsa, don't even joke. It is easily one of the most aggressively conservative and corrupt cities in the US.

humanrebar 10y ago
Given these comments in this thread, not just this one, I must have missed some dog whistle where this was a pitch to liberal engineers that can't afford San Fransisco anymore. Anyway, I picked a medium-small city arbitrarily. Look at Lawrence, Kansas or Bloomington, IN then. They each have big state universities in town. Or Eugene, OR.

gdulli 10y ago

Conflating politics with what shows up in your Facebook feed is how we got into this mess.

humanrebar 10y ago
Agreed. I've just observed that the really agitated people tend to agitate themselves more than their environment does. Social media being an obvious example.

rconti 10y ago

Plus, you'd be further from Peter Thiel.

indemnity 10y ago
You know Peter Thiel has New Zealand citizenship, right? And owns a massive bolthole ranch on the South Island should things turn pear shaped.

mistermann 10y ago

> Especially if you stay off Facebook. And stop talking to people. What you're saying, at least in a sense, is there's no cultural difference between the two places.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 10y ago

Yes but New Zealand is much less likely to ever be bombed flat than Tulsa is. Discovering the reasons for this is left as an exercise for the reader.

stevenwoo 10y ago

Staying off of Facebook doesn't insulate someone if they are not caucasian. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/24/shooting-of-2-indians-in-us-bar-sends-shock-waves-in-india/ http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/24/shooting-of-2-indians-... I don't know if you know this, but large swaths of America were so unsafe to travel for African Americans for a long time after slavery ended, that a guidebook was created specifically for the purpose of avoiding the most dangerous areas. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/green-book-helped-keep-african-americans-safe-on-the-road/ http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/green-book-helped-ke...

Banthum 10y ago
I'll believe immigrants' revealed preferences. Clearly they prefer living around those horrible white people to living around their own people in their own country. And - Good thing none of us have a time portal to 1954.
self-diversity 10y ago
I'm having a hard time drawing a connection between your opening sentence and literally anything else in your post. Did you forget to factor in the passage of decades?
- albemuth 10y ago
  The events on the first link happened this year. Also, BLM.

Apocryphon 10y ago

When I think of NZ, I imagine South Pacific beaches, lush forests of emu and kiwi and other exotic animals, and the landscape of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. What natural beauty does Tulsa have?

antod 10y ago
You're selling Tulsa short - it has the same number of wild emus as NZ does.
- tomrod 10y ago
  Hilarious!
tomrod 10y ago
Amazing sunsets, beautiful prairie flowers, some caves. Cheap access to beef, often. Delicious peaches. Don't knock Tulsa, it's not some hell hole.
EdwardDiego 10y ago
Looks like our tourism marketing campaigns are paying off, although emus are Australian, we had moa, but they're extinct now. Not pictured in the tourism campaigns - our vast reliance on agriculture.
- int_19h 10y ago
  Is it really a bad thing? When I see "vast reliance on agriculture", or, say, "net exporter of agricultural products", I read it as "self-sufficient country that can feed itself even in troubled times". If anything, this sort of thing might command a premium in the current environment.
  - EdwardDiego 10y ago
    No, but it's not as pretty as the stuff in LOTR. And the pollution problems caused by the massive conversion to dairy over the last 20 years is becoming a big issue - turns out New Zealanders like being able to swim in their rivers and lakes.

RantyDave 10y ago

Houses in New Zealand are mad expensive. Auckland (for instance) now has an average house price over $1M, about $700k US. It is, I believe, the fourth least affordable housing market in the world after Hong Kong, Sydney and Vancouver.

marssaxman 10y ago
Looks like the Auckland median price is NZ$890K, which is roughly US$623K. Here in Seattle, the median price just hit US$700K... Auckland doesn't sound so bad!
- rjgray 10y ago
  In terms of affordability, you'd need to look at average salaries as well. My impression is that Auckland doesn't fare so well on that front.
  - lazyasciiart 10y ago
    Yes, Auckland rates much worse than Seattle (and most of the world) in that comparison - http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf (Auckland has a median house:median salary ratio of 10.0, Seattle is 5.5)
- taysic 10y ago
  If its anything like Sydney, Australia then you should look at the quality of the houses too - not just the median house price. I remember looking at houses in Sydney and given the size, quality, and look they would cost half as much here in the Bay area. They can be tiny, tiny even for our standards and cost over 1 mil.
- RantyDave 10y ago
  https://www.qv.co.nz/property-trends/residential-house-values https://www.qv.co.nz/property-trends/residential-house-value...
- lacampbell 10y ago