6 ms·

There are places within 3 hours drive of SF, where you can pay $1000 to buy an acre of land (200 acre parcels minimum). At some point, telecommuting technology

There are places within 3 hours drive of SF, where you can pay $1000 to buy an acre of land (200 acre parcels minimum). At some point, telecommuting technology will encourage an exodus of tech workers. Some people, yes, want a city life. Others don't want to lose 50% of their earnings on buying or renting housing.

bogomipz 9y ago
>"At some point, telecommuting technology will encourage an exodus of tech workers." But we already have Slack/Hangouts/Github/HipChat/Skype/Trello etc and most(the majority?) of the tech jobs in SF require you to come into the office no? I don't believe its the tech worker themselves who are short on encouragement.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  I'm at a small company right now and I live 30 minutes door-to-door from work, and I WFH when I can. When it comes to solo-work my lead agrees I'm just as-productive, if not more-so, when I'm at home - but things like meetings and "hey, can you take a look at this thing on my computer?" just don't work remotely - it's the little things: like how even a 1080p conference room camera can't pick-up small details on the whiteboard and how people can't just pass me a printed document. It was the same on my teams when I was at Microsoft too - we did have a couple of remote-workers, but they were effectively treated as contractors who worked in silos - because that's all they can do well when you can't get all that face-to-face contact. Plus there's a lot of juicy talk and rumors over lunch that just don't get to participate in as well.
- shostack 9y ago
  While this is HN, with its associated demographics, the reality is that many office jobs just aren't as feasible for remote work. Face time and hallway conversations can be incredibly important for a healthy company.
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    Can you say specifically what office jobs can't be done remotely and why? Also can you say what type of content can only be communicated in a hallway but not via video conferencing, chat, phone or email?
    - tomjakubowski 9y ago
      There are software jobs that require physical access to expensive and/or impractically huge pieces of hardware. For example, my job is to write software for 40' display walls and immersion rooms that are controlled by input devices connected to (very) pricey room-sized spatial tracking systems. Sometimes I'm able to do my work for the day remotely or otherwise without access to these systems, but quite often an engineer or designer has to be sitting in the space to properly develop, test, or debug an application written for it.
    - JBlue42 9y ago
      Watching my co-workers, who are architects, I think some is good for remote, some not. Pick-and-choose from below. Despite creating everything digitally, there's a lot of high-quality photographic printing to be pinned up and observed during critiques with senior people. A team will also crowd around someone at their desk and discuss, point out, live model/design something. The level of equipment ($4k+ desktop towers) wouldn't be as easy to standardize or support. If a user ran into an issue, one in which remoting in wouldn't work for support, it'd take much more time to diagnose and rectify rather than on-site. They are definitely not as computer savvy as probably a lot of the folks working at GitHub but need high-performance machines. We have a client representative that flies in from a city a couple hours away every week to go over designs. They sit in a large conference room with a team and has a remote conference with team members in the city they flew in from.
    - closeparen 9y ago
      Have you ever actually used a phone or video conference? Laggy, artifact-laden, unintelligible, half-duplex (pretending to be full-duplex but you can't actually speak simultaneously and hear each other), incredibly awkward and slow compared to actually being in a room with someone. Landlines could solve some of those problems, but how often are all parties going to have landlines? Some of the most important information I've picked up at work has been from overhearing keywords and jumping into a conversation across the room, chatting with coworkers at lunch, etc. I could do something that resembles my software engineering job if I only worked on the tickets as written and the Zoom meetings as scheduled, but not nearly as well.
- Tempest1981 9y ago
  Maybe we can start with telecommuting 1 or 2 days a week. Or half days. Reducing peak traffic just 20% would be a big win.
PopsiclePete 9y ago
>There are places within 3 hours drive of SF, where you can pay $1000 to buy an acre of land (200 acre parcels minimum). I don't know what I'd do in a place like that. I'm not a farmer; I don't need acres and acres of land. Am I just going to sit on my porch and look at the trees? I think I'd end up blowing my own brains after a month or so of living like that.
- RussianCow 9y ago
  I'm not a farmer either, but I would take space, quiet, and privacy over having to live in a small apartment in the middle of a loud, expensive, and overcrowded city. To each their own.
- digitalzombie 9y ago
  You're probably single or ain't really into nature?. City life is better for that. For a couple it's good. And if you want to do stuff driving once and a while isn't so bad. Camping, etc...
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  I've mused about buying such rolling hills with oaks many many times on drives to Yosemite / Tahoe. Among many factors, I was pretty sure the land had no water :P
zanny 9y ago
In terms of total cost, cities are much, much cheaper than either rural or urban sprawl development. The costs look high up front when you consider a 50 story condo building will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but then you recognize it will house several thousand people and contain a majority of the infrastructure for their lives internally and suddenly the per-person costs are paltry compared to maintaining an entire town for the same number of people with roads, utilities, sanitation, maintenance, etc. Maybe telecommuting can bring down this endless nimby fantasy of investment properties to finally kill draconian zoning that prevents building to meet demand and changing times. Then we might see growing cities that are also affordable be the norm and not the exception. The problem with SF et al is the pressure to resist change in these cities due to nimbyism and zoning, which means they cannot adapt to demand and thus prices inflate.
bbcbasic 9y ago
I don't think the people living on the streets are tech workers. Can't telecommute janitorial work.
tmh79 9y ago
living like that is probably the worst possible thing one can do for the environment unless they are living off the grid, farming for themselves etc. This is not a scalable solution to make our planet a better place.
- SomewhatLikely 9y ago
  The only scalable solution to make our planet a better place is curtailing population growth.
hbosch 9y ago
200 acres 3 hrs away from a major metro? If all it took to be happy was land, we'd already be in our telecommuting utopia. Unfortunately, the subtle joys of life still tend to require physical presence. I don't think "city life" is popular with today's generation because it's close to work... I think it's because we value human contact and cultural diversity above acreage or square footage.
- ixacto 9y ago
  So work for a company in expensive places, and live in a cheaper college town. You get the human contact, good food&bars, and it's not going to take your 50% income to live there. The median home price is $267,000 in Eugene, OR and $1,189,100 in SF. 37% home value per year @ $100k vs 8% for SF.
kevinburke 9y ago
> Some people, yes, want a city life. For the moment the best and the most numerous job opportunities are in the cities, especially for young people. Restrictive housing requirements choke the earnings of young people This paper goes into this phenomenon in more detail: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21154 http://www.nber.org/papers/w21154

bogomipz 9y ago

>"At some point, telecommuting technology will encourage an exodus of tech workers." But we already have Slack/Hangouts/Github/HipChat/Skype/Trello etc and most(the majority?) of the tech jobs in SF require you to come into the office no? I don't believe its the tech worker themselves who are short on encouragement.

DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
I'm at a small company right now and I live 30 minutes door-to-door from work, and I WFH when I can. When it comes to solo-work my lead agrees I'm just as-productive, if not more-so, when I'm at home - but things like meetings and "hey, can you take a look at this thing on my computer?" just don't work remotely - it's the little things: like how even a 1080p conference room camera can't pick-up small details on the whiteboard and how people can't just pass me a printed document. It was the same on my teams when I was at Microsoft too - we did have a couple of remote-workers, but they were effectively treated as contractors who worked in silos - because that's all they can do well when you can't get all that face-to-face contact. Plus there's a lot of juicy talk and rumors over lunch that just don't get to participate in as well.
shostack 9y ago
While this is HN, with its associated demographics, the reality is that many office jobs just aren't as feasible for remote work. Face time and hallway conversations can be incredibly important for a healthy company.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  Can you say specifically what office jobs can't be done remotely and why? Also can you say what type of content can only be communicated in a hallway but not via video conferencing, chat, phone or email?
  - tomjakubowski 9y ago
    There are software jobs that require physical access to expensive and/or impractically huge pieces of hardware. For example, my job is to write software for 40' display walls and immersion rooms that are controlled by input devices connected to (very) pricey room-sized spatial tracking systems. Sometimes I'm able to do my work for the day remotely or otherwise without access to these systems, but quite often an engineer or designer has to be sitting in the space to properly develop, test, or debug an application written for it.
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    Watching my co-workers, who are architects, I think some is good for remote, some not. Pick-and-choose from below. Despite creating everything digitally, there's a lot of high-quality photographic printing to be pinned up and observed during critiques with senior people. A team will also crowd around someone at their desk and discuss, point out, live model/design something. The level of equipment ($4k+ desktop towers) wouldn't be as easy to standardize or support. If a user ran into an issue, one in which remoting in wouldn't work for support, it'd take much more time to diagnose and rectify rather than on-site. They are definitely not as computer savvy as probably a lot of the folks working at GitHub but need high-performance machines. We have a client representative that flies in from a city a couple hours away every week to go over designs. They sit in a large conference room with a team and has a remote conference with team members in the city they flew in from.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    Have you ever actually used a phone or video conference? Laggy, artifact-laden, unintelligible, half-duplex (pretending to be full-duplex but you can't actually speak simultaneously and hear each other), incredibly awkward and slow compared to actually being in a room with someone. Landlines could solve some of those problems, but how often are all parties going to have landlines? Some of the most important information I've picked up at work has been from overhearing keywords and jumping into a conversation across the room, chatting with coworkers at lunch, etc. I could do something that resembles my software engineering job if I only worked on the tickets as written and the Zoom meetings as scheduled, but not nearly as well.
Tempest1981 9y ago
Maybe we can start with telecommuting 1 or 2 days a week. Or half days. Reducing peak traffic just 20% would be a big win.

PopsiclePete 9y ago

>There are places within 3 hours drive of SF, where you can pay $1000 to buy an acre of land (200 acre parcels minimum). I don't know what I'd do in a place like that. I'm not a farmer; I don't need acres and acres of land. Am I just going to sit on my porch and look at the trees? I think I'd end up blowing my own brains after a month or so of living like that.

RussianCow 9y ago
I'm not a farmer either, but I would take space, quiet, and privacy over having to live in a small apartment in the middle of a loud, expensive, and overcrowded city. To each their own.
digitalzombie 9y ago
You're probably single or ain't really into nature?. City life is better for that. For a couple it's good. And if you want to do stuff driving once and a while isn't so bad. Camping, etc...
hkmurakami 9y ago
I've mused about buying such rolling hills with oaks many many times on drives to Yosemite / Tahoe. Among many factors, I was pretty sure the land had no water :P

zanny 9y ago

In terms of total cost, cities are much, much cheaper than either rural or urban sprawl development. The costs look high up front when you consider a 50 story condo building will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but then you recognize it will house several thousand people and contain a majority of the infrastructure for their lives internally and suddenly the per-person costs are paltry compared to maintaining an entire town for the same number of people with roads, utilities, sanitation, maintenance, etc. Maybe telecommuting can bring down this endless nimby fantasy of investment properties to finally kill draconian zoning that prevents building to meet demand and changing times. Then we might see growing cities that are also affordable be the norm and not the exception. The problem with SF et al is the pressure to resist change in these cities due to nimbyism and zoning, which means they cannot adapt to demand and thus prices inflate.

bbcbasic 9y ago

I don't think the people living on the streets are tech workers. Can't telecommute janitorial work.

tmh79 9y ago

living like that is probably the worst possible thing one can do for the environment unless they are living off the grid, farming for themselves etc. This is not a scalable solution to make our planet a better place.

SomewhatLikely 9y ago
The only scalable solution to make our planet a better place is curtailing population growth.

hbosch 9y ago

200 acres 3 hrs away from a major metro? If all it took to be happy was land, we'd already be in our telecommuting utopia. Unfortunately, the subtle joys of life still tend to require physical presence. I don't think "city life" is popular with today's generation because it's close to work... I think it's because we value human contact and cultural diversity above acreage or square footage.

ixacto 9y ago
So work for a company in expensive places, and live in a cheaper college town. You get the human contact, good food&bars, and it's not going to take your 50% income to live there. The median home price is $267,000 in Eugene, OR and $1,189,100 in SF. 37% home value per year @ $100k vs 8% for SF.

kevinburke 9y ago

> Some people, yes, want a city life. For the moment the best and the most numerous job opportunities are in the cities, especially for young people. Restrictive housing requirements choke the earnings of young people This paper goes into this phenomenon in more detail: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21154 http://www.nber.org/papers/w21154