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Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

69 points by boulos 8y ago

scarejunba 8y ago
How about “stop being actively hostile to people”. Most rural areas are populated by anti-people people. They want some idea of “jobs”, meaning they want themselves to have higher quality higher compensated work. They don’t want anyone else to come there because “traffic”, “this place is full”, and “do you want this to be Manhattan? God forbid people not want to live in shoeboxes” and shit like that. They’re also usually homophobic, transphobic, racist, and xenophobic. It isn’t 90-10 but the true shift in society happens when you go 60-40 one way to the other. No one wants to live in this parochial backwater but them. Don’t trust me, ask Pew Research Centre. Anyway, all told, each region gets what they encourage. This 10% requirement is idiotic. If rural regions want tech jobs, they can stop sucking so badly.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > How about “stop being actively hostile to people”. Most rural areas are populated by anti-people people. ... I don't buy this. Have you ever been to some of these places (let alone "most" of them) or are you just repeating self-serving urbanites' stereotypes? Villeinizing rural folks is a pastime as old as history itself.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    Haha. Cool etymology reference. Yeah, man. I've lived in small towns in the South. I didn't make shit up. But why believe me. ? Go see how many rural people think marriage should be between a man and a woman. Go on. Convince yourself without my interference with a source you think is reputable. But if you'd rather I show you something, take a gander at this https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/record-percentage-americans-support-gay-marriage-poll-finds-n799376 https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/record-percentage-am... (47% for allowing in rural regions) And if you want to entertain yourself, narrow that to Republicans in the region and see what they think allowing gay marriage is for society http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/urban-suburban-and-rural-residents-views-on-key-social-and-political-issues/psd_05-22-18_community-type-02-03/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/urban-suburban-and... You can try to cozy up to them if you want. I'll call them what a straight majority of them are: homophobes. If the truth offends, the sin is in your eye.
    - general8bitso 8y ago
      rural != ‘The South’
      - scarejunba 8y ago
        That's right, trivially. I was in rural areas in The South. No person's experience of rural areas = The South because of the obviousness of the fact that the RHS is a larger set than the LHS and therefore the obvious set equivalence would mean that they are different. Fortunately, I have on the ground experience. But I don't even have to try that hard because we have surveys these days, and rural voters aren't afraid to show their homophobia. Also, as an aside, did you think people forgot Prop 8 so fast? It wasn't The Bay or LA that pushed that over the line.
  - velobro 8y ago
    My parents moved to California from southeast Missouri, also known as "Missourah". As of this day we are the only ones in our family that don't live in Missouri/Tennessee/Arkansas. My Mom stopped taking my sister and I to visit on our 1 month breaks (elementary school track system) when I was about 12 due to the overall toxcicity of the rest of my family. They resented the fact that my father and her "left" and became succesful in the construction business during California's 80/90s housing boom. The mindset of the rural individual is that of jealousy. They want the opportunities of a big city where there are more people, but they don't "like" people. That's why they choose to live rural and have that become part of their identity. That "identity" is wholly incompatible with a densly populated area. This is why Trump is able to appeal to these people by promising them good economic fortunes without them having to change their way of life.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      > ... They want the opportunities of a big city where there are more people, but they don't "like" people. That's why they choose to live rural and have that become part of their identity. That "identity" is wholly incompatible with a densly populated area. ... Or maybe they just like living somewhere cheap and with plenty of space around them. You know, like anyone sensible would, other things being equal. It has nothing to do with them being misanthropes. Or are Chinese and Indian folks so much more empathetic than us Westerners also, because they live in such population density?
- nvo 8y ago
  Funny you call them prejudiced when, after reading this comment, it's clear you're the one who's prejudiced.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    Haha, it's not prejudice when it's based in fact. If people don't want to be called homophobic, they have to just stop being against gay marriage. Wise enough to know it's wrong to be against gay marriage, not wise enough to stop being against it. What an interesting saddle point in the moral curve!
    - nvo 8y ago
      First, you're generalising, which is exactly what you complain they do. Second, they should be free to take any political stance that they want.
      - scarejunba 8y ago
        Oh they're welcome to it. But they aren't going to get the fancy jobs because no one wants to live with their insanity. Civil rights ain't just "political stance" homie. It's all right, though. Nobody is going to move tech jobs there so long as they stay evil. And it's not generalizing any more than saying that a cup of ice-cream that is 47% vanilla and 53% shit is shit ice-cream.
growtofill 8y ago
> Shame on us for shipping over 211,000 of these jobs offshore to countries like Malaysia and Brazil. Americans have an advantage in doing them because of a cultural understanding of what businesses need and a more convenient time zone. > When some of the Beckley students asked me what more they should do to bring tech, I joked that they would be wise to open up a few more Pakistani or Indian restaurants. So the idea is one should not be a valuable tech employee working for a US company from abroad, they should come to the country and wash the dishes for a few years first? No, thank you.
- rndgermandude 8y ago
  No >I saw that spark in the Beckley [W.Va] students, many from coal mining families It's quite the opposite: The joke was that the local US population should open those restaurants to attract tech talent to their towns.
- general8bitso 8y ago
  It was a bad cargo-culting joke.
general8bitso 8y ago
So, I believe the WVU Beckley campus was the formerly defunct Mountain State University. Closed in 2013.
hnaccy 8y ago
>Economists keep telling those left out of our digital future to move to the tech hubs. Sometimes I wonder if they have ever been to places like Jefferson, Iowa, or Beckley, W.Va. If they visit, they will realize that many people there are not looking to move. They are proud of their small-town values and enjoy being close to family. They brag that their town doesn’t need many traffic lights. Then they can enjoy the economic fruits of their small town.
- pixl97 8y ago
  Ah yes, only two choices. The economic desolation of small towns, or the over zoned asset inflated city. This surely end well.
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- dang 8y ago
  Please don't post shallow dismissals to HN. It degrades discussion and we're trying for better than that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jelliclesfarm 8y ago
Ro Khanna is my hometown progressive. So..obviously..I distrust the politician representing us. Why can’t he do a better job with our multitude of problems? Bay Area is choking. In more ways than one. Talking points is not the same as actually getting them done. It’s just a way to get elected. Again. Also..am I the only one who found the Indian-Pakistani restaurant quip offensive? This is why some of the rest of the country smirks at Californians. I am from the same region as he is..and I would NEVER make that comment in Beckley, W.Va. It’s just..well...rude.
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- kevinconaway 8y ago
  >Ro Khanna is my hometown progressive. So..obviously..I distrust the politician representing us. As someone not from the Bay Area, will you please explain why this is obvious? > Why can’t he do a better job with our multitude of problems? Perhaps because he has only been in Congress since 2016 and in that time, the Democrats have been in the minority and mostly powerless to do much of anything
  - jelliclesfarm 8y ago
    Because local constituents have a front row seat wherein we hear what politicians say and what they do and how they do it. In any average Silicon Valley town(or college town for that matter) where there are more non voting residents than those who can vote, the policies are geared towards everyone and usually not in the interest of those who are long term residents and have voted and have paid taxes. So politicians have to deliver for both the voting and non voting constituents, but they have to convince the voters to choose what’s sometimes not in their best interest. This is the reason most politicians lie or back track. It is a most superior skill to be able to convince people to choose what isn’t in their best interest. In California..and especially the Silicon Valley mega region, politicians of all stripe have honed this skill to a fine art form.
    - 8y ago
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
If cities are rich because of high concentrations of capital and talent, then it really is a choice between living in a poor area and living in a rich one. You can’t make the poor areas rich without giving them qualities of the rich areas, at which point they simply switch over and become “big cities”.
- thrwthrw93223 8y ago
  How is it just a choice of living in a poor area vs a rich one? What if the people living in the poor areas don’t even have a high school degree? Can they suddenly decide they want to work and live in the rich area?
  - chillacy 8y ago
    I’m a couple generations maybe. Moving from a poor area to a rich one and working your butt off for your kid’s education so they can reach professional successes you didn’t have the opportunity to is an archetypical immigrant story.
    - apocalypstyx 8y ago
      I'm convinced this is just another Protestant work ethic as secularized by capitalism, ala Max Weber. Each generation is supposed to work hard and devote everything (or almost everything) so their kids have it better, but who gets to say, I have it better, I'm not going to work hard anymore, so I can enjoy some of it? How the public general treats people who have amassed enough to live on but don't actively have a job, seems a testament to the religious foundations and origins of the idea, rather than anything drawn from what might be called reason.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Yes, that has been happening for the last 150 years at least.
    - pixl97 8y ago
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eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
I come from a small town (a few thousand people). I was able to “get out” because I found a remote position. I think that is the cheapest way — for the employer and employee —- to lift these these places up.
chillacy 8y ago
Digital nomads will go to places like Thailand where CoL is cheap and internet is fast, I wonder if a small town could emulate that experience. Doesn’t have to be quite as cheap, but won’t give you food poisoning and could be safer too.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  I think a big part of the reason (western) digital nomads go to Southeast Asia is for the tropical weather and exoticism. It would be hard for small town America to replicate those experiences.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Exotic locations stop being so after you live in them for a few years. Time zone issues can end up as a real pain, which makes the US rather appealing. Weather wise most of Florida is really cheap and Hawaii can be surprisingly affordable a few miles from the beach. So, I suspect the digital nomads living in Asia stereotype is more about them being interesting than that many people actually doing so.
    - ForHackernews 8y ago
      Hawai'i is "surprisingly affordable" only relative to the Bay Area. All labor is at first-world American rates and so many things have to be shipped in. Maybe it's an option for wealthy Silicon Valley escapees, but it's surely not a solution for the economic woes of middle America.
      - Retric 8y ago
        I am mostly talking digital nomads lifestyles. You can buy a nice 2br condo for 50k. That’s cheap compared to most major US cities. High speed internet for 50$/ month is generally available and you pay ~75c / lb to get computer equipment shipped out which is a minimal increase. Mostly it’s just food and energy prices that are a little high, but that’s not nessisarily a huge budget item. 40k is easily comfortable if you don’t need to travel or have kids. That said, the median income is also significantly higher than the rest of the US. And things get crazy if you want to live near the ocean, and travel regularly.
erikb 8y ago
Improvement to YOUR life always comes from YOU. If someone else does something it is to improve THEIR life. They will certainly tell you that it will be good for you, but in the end your advantage would only be a nice-to-have side effect. If you feel the money is passing you by without you getting a share then YOU need to find out how to change. For instance by learning how to do "tech stuff". And then, when there are a bunch of people who really want to improve actual problems arise. E.g. universities being too expensive for them. Even free online courses require some level of basic skill to start use them. How to get the funds for the equipment. And of course the technicl infrastructure to provide electricity, infrastructure and basic living needs one can't provide for when one spends 10 hours crunching technical problems. These are problems I hoped to find answers for in the article, or at least suggestions. People being too proud to accept the new status quo and hoping for more icing on their apparently already tasty enough cake before they start moving their asses, that is nothing. Even if they get it they won't start moving. Cake makes fat and lazy. I personally feel a lot of the mid-level towns in Western countries (not just in the US of A) actually have a good starting point. Roads and trains are already government supported and therefore good enough quality or better. Super markets and a few restaurants are there already as well. Internet is there, although it's maybe not the highest speed. Schools and libraries have some computers and wifi access if they want to. Office rent and land prices are cheap. Also with the internet location itself is less and less important, which is why so many administrative and create jobs can be outsourced. They could be outsourced to your town as well, if you could find a way to compete. No need to be close to natural resources, in a trade hub like a coastal town, etc. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with road and internet access is totally fine to start competing. The only thing that is really missing badly is people moving their asses. They have a tv and enough money to buy beer. The car repair every once in a while is quite painful, but otherwise they don't feel motivated to do anything with their life. Some won't even travel to a nearby coastal town for a weekend on the beach or something. In the meantime I'm friends with a Chinese cook who works for $100/month a 14h/7day cooking job and then after that at home spends time learning how to code to make more money and work fewer hours. I mean, if our rural folks could get up to do half of that, then they would be able to work a $50k remote work web/app developer position in no time, and boom they are part of the "tech elite".
paulsutter 8y ago
More remote-first companies are the best way to bring jobs everywhere. Remote-first working is a separate and new skill that needs to be developed.
- ascar 8y ago
  I'm not sure that there is enough demand for remote work. Many people enjoy and even require the social interactions provided at a workplace and don't want solitary remote work.
  - paulsutter 8y ago
    “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” — Western Union internal memo, 1876. “The problem of TV was that people had to glue their eyes to a screen, and that the average American wouldn’t have time for it.” − The New York Times, 1939
  - dbattaglia 8y ago
    I’m currently at my third remote job. The first time, I was 29, newly single and I found it got old real fast. Moving back to an office environment was a major improvement for me. Fast forward 10 years, I’m married again, different living situation (in the city now) and I absolutely love the freedom and lifestyle of working remote again. There are a ton of factors involved but I suspect I’m not alone in finding remote work more appealing as I get older and more settled.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Much younger me worked in a very different environment with respect to communications, information availability, etc. of course. But I still can't really envision newly graduated me hanging out in my apartment and just communicating using my (then-nonexistent) laptop. Today, I attend a lot of events, go into an office sometimes, have some off-sites, etc. But I'm much less interested in day-to-day coffees, lunches, work sports leagues, etc. than I once was.
LeanderK 8y ago
well, germany is quite spread out and has lots of tech in smaller towns. It's not always perfect and we are also struggeling with some things, but I think a few approaches can be emulated. First, I think it's important that the small town is not on it's own, but in a close neighborhood of other smaller towns with which it's cooperating a lot. For a serious tech economy, even small towns need a working ecosystem (and I think can't be too small). They have to specialize, cooperate and develop the needed ecosystem, so that they can reach "critical mass" in some area. Ideally, this includes a small university nearby, so that there's a cooperation between the task of education and employement and the specialized, needed workforce can be trained. Also, research-institutes, which help small businesses which can't fund a research division on their own, are important. In germany, they are often coupled with thematic industrial clusters, a smaller patch of land where the city tries to get all the industry together. The research-institutes in germany are the Frauenhofer-institutes, public-private partnerships of applied reasearch with a focus and goal of supporting the local economy. For example, the small town of Hof in bavaria with a population of 45.000. It has a university of applied science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hof_University_of_Applied_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hof_University_of_Applied_Scie...), which is focused on educating the workforce suitable to the local economy (often in close cooperation). There's some research going on in the university, but it's not a research intensive one. Since the textile-industry in Hof is quite strong, there's a Frauenhofer cooperating with the university of applied science nearby (https://www.htl.fraunhofer.de/en/manufacturing-processes/textile-engineering.html https://www.htl.fraunhofer.de/en/manufacturing-processes/tex...). TLDR: I think tech in smaller towns is possible, but it needs a specialized economy, not too-small towns and a close cooperation between the public and private. Tech won't come by itself, it needs to be lured.
- cmrdporcupine 8y ago
  From my experience visiting, Germany does a much better job of getting services into smaller communities. From Mainz, where my family lives, we took streetcar and then bus out into surrounding villages and towns which would be totally un-serviced by transit if they were in North America -- even in areas where the population density is equivalent or higher (such as where I live in southern Ontario). Tech infrastructure is only one part of it. North America's rural economy is broken due to land use and industry problems. Once you get out of exurbia or areas that are appealing as retirement or vacation homes, the land is mostly just swathes of cash crop mega farms and towns mostly disappearing due to lack of jobs. Europe's mostly small towns predate the industrial revolution and the green revolution. They have cultural and economic roots that seem to have persisted better through the 20th century's transformations.
rayiner 8y ago
There was a big push to wire up rural areas in the early 2000s. It didn’t happen everywhere, but it happened in quite a few places that can serve as data points. Here in Maryland there is quite a bit of municipal fiber covering the areas Verizon FiOS doesn’t. Some of it has been in place since the early 2000s. Are those communities with fiber doing better than those without it, economically? They’re not doing any better than their neighbors without fiber. The limiting factor isn’t the availability of bandwidth, it’s the lack of desire to hire anyone from these places for remote work. This is not a “build it and they will come” situation. Many places built it. Nobody came. People have these unfounded romantic notions about fiber and economic development. Here in Maryland, more than 60% of households have access to fiber. Has it revolutionized the economy? Not at all. Annapolis is a small city (pop. 40,000) that has had fiber more than a decade and almost all the tech jobs here are connected to the Navy (and we’re already here). What do people do with fiber here? Netflix. Fiber is not a catalyst for job creation and economic growth. It’s a means for content consumption. That makes it an awful investment of public dollars.
- oculusthrift 8y ago
  i think it’s perfectly fine to invest public money on things that improve everyone’s lives. for me and and many others fiber provides a much higher quality of living even if it doesn’t bring extra growth economically.
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- msla 8y ago
  > This is not a “build it and they will come” situation. Many places built it. Nobody came. Yes, sadly, paved roads are not a magical fairy dust. No, wait... electrification isn't a fairy dust. My mistake. No, wait... phones aren't magic. No, wait... /s
- bcherny 8y ago
  Could it be that you need to first invest in fiber, then you need to invest in other things like small business incentives and attracting VC?
jonstewart 8y ago
There are several comments here noting that small towns are pretty well wired. I’m fortunate to have just purchased a vacation home in rural Wisconsin (close to family). In DC, I have 100Mbps fiber, a free upgrade from FiOS from the 25Mbps I ordered, with the option to get a gigabit. At my other house, I have a 6Mbps DSL that only delivers 1.5Mbps at best, with a couple hundred Kbps upload. There’s a cell tower only a mile away, but hills and trees obscure the signal; still with two bars I can get 20Mbps on my iPhone. Can I get a reasonable data plan? No. All the data plans cost a lot for a little, and throttle you to 2G after a hundred GB or so of download per month. My hope is to spend a good portion of every summer working remotely in Wisconsin. I’ll be hard-pressed to make video conferences and pairing sessions work, and I sure won’t be streaming many shows for entertainment in the evenings.
- rayiner 8y ago
  Why didn’t you buy a vacation home in a place that’s better wired? We stayed at an AirBnB is Putnam County, NY recently that had very solid 100 Mbps cable. You can get 100 Mbps cable throughout Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Easton, a town of 15,000, is upgrading its municipal cable system to gigabit. What does it say about the importance of high-speed broadband access as a differentiating factor that even someone in the tech industry will move somewhere without it? Is that a compelling fact for towns like Easton who believe that investing in municipal broadband will attract more residents?
  - jonstewart 8y ago
    Your question comes across as a bit rude. To answer it, because after half a year of looking, it was far closer to the ideal across a range of factors than anything else we’d found. I didn’t really notice how terrible the DSL was until after we purchased. The Eastern Shore in Maryland can be pretty rural, but it’s still Maryland. Euston is 15,000; my place is between two villages, one of 900 and the other of 1600. In town, Internet access _is_ pretty decent. But the countryside is another matter. Cities are economic powerhouses because they have network effects. My career has benefited from those network effects, and I think it would be a personal mistake for me to convert to a 100% remote position. But I can leverage a bit of that career capital to be remote sometime and take advantage of the vast cost differences between a coastal city and the rural Midwest, and get some lifestyle advantages from it (most importantly having my children see their extended family members far more frequently). I am going to have to invest a decent amount in equipment and services (e.g., MiFi, antenna, a router that’ll support line sharing with the cell, VPS, etc.) to make it work. That’s not to say “poor me,” far from it, but simply to point out that rural broadband can really suck in some places. And I’m lucky in that the cell signal exists; lots of places it doesn’t.
RickJWagner 8y ago
What a nice article. I'm a programmer living in a rural area (and am usually politically conservative.) I really didn't expect to see such an article in the NYT, especially authored by a politician from the left side of the aisle. Brings a good start to 2019. Thanks, Rep. Khanna!
thaumaturgy 8y ago
I was one part of a group of people who worked hard for several years to try to nurture a growing a tech scene in a rural area not far from Sacramento. I stepped away from that almost two years ago and my current thinking is it can't be done, not just because we largely failed at it but because there are a number of other towns trying to do the same and they aren't getting traction either. I wonder if a healthy tech economy isn't more of an emergent behavior, and it tends to emerge in cities because there are more people, more resources, and more opportunities all mixing together. You need good communications infrastructure, not just fiber but cellular too. If all you have available is satellite or (gulp) DSL, it's really painful to get work done. But that requires an enormous financial investment, especially in rural areas where RoI-per-mile is mostly negative. Often the rural areas already have a culture there, and that culture doesn't necessarily want to get along with tech. Here, cellular providers can't deploy new towers because too many people are convinced that they'll get cancer, including some members of city council. Rural areas will tend to be mostly populated by people who either moved to get away from the city, or have never experienced life in a city. For those people, there's very little about a strong tech scene that sounds marketably attractive. That also means that the talent just isn't there. And talent isn't there in part because opportunity isn't there. And opportunity isn't there because talent and infrastructure aren't there. Nobody wants to just pump half a billion dollars or more into a small town just to see what shakes out, and if you did, you'd probably only end up ruining everything that made it an attractive enough small town to experiment with in the first place. This is all really a shame, because it's contributing to a lot of the political and economic divide in this country, as rural areas are neglected, and shrink, and die slow deaths, while people all jostle for tiny amounts of space at high cost in dense population centers.
- lsc 8y ago
  I grew up in a rural area near Sacramento. Culture is your big problem; when I was there, reading in public was "gay" and grounds for a (light) beating/physical humiliation. Of course, I was in high school at the time, and high school is terrible everywhere; I'm sure it's different for adults. But, point being, at least in the '90s, it was not a place that encourages you to study or engage in intellectual pursuits.
LyndsySimon 8y ago
Education is not the issue, in my experience - career opportunities are. I work remotely and live in a rural area. To get my career to the point where I could reliably find remote work, I moved to Charlottesville, VA for five years. Meanwhile, of the 20 or so people I’ve tracked down with two-year degrees intended to train them for tech jobs, exactly zero have done so. The primary problem that I see is that no one wants to hire a remote junior developer. Senior, sure, but never junior.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Speaking as someone who mostly works remotely (after multiple decades of working in an office most of the time), I have a lot of trouble envisioning coming out of school and sitting in an apartment at my computer all day. Sure, there are consulting jobs where you spend most of your days at a client site or otherwise don't work from an office much. Perhaps had I had a job like that I'd feel differently. But going straight from school to a fully remote engineering position would, I think, have been very difficult for me.
  - LyndsySimon 8y ago
    It would have been for me, too - without the school, though, as I didn’t graduate. That’s my point. Where does someone in a rural area get the experience to make that transition effectively?
scarface74 8y ago
... They are proud of their small-town values .... And this part of the issue. I come from a small town. The “values” of small towns are racist, homophopic, and nationalistic. I’ve known many people who moved away, started dating someone of another race and then come back home with their significant other and feel completely out of place - not because of family, but because of the city. I’ve also had gay relatives who refuse to visit family back home but welcome them to come to where they live in a larger city. I’m Black and in conversations, when I tell people where I live - an infamous “sundown town” as recently as the 80s - the first thing I hear is “why do you want to live around all of those White folks”. People don’t understand how much of an anachronism small town America is. The brain drain is real, young people who are capable can’t wait to move as soon as possible to experience more of the world. I can’t imagine anyone who is not a native born American ever wanting to live there.
- shard972 8y ago
  > And this part of the issue. I come from a small town. The “values” of small towns are racist, homophopic, and nationalistic. As someone that comes from small towns and lives in the city, I find city dwellers to be much more racist and judging than rural folk. The fact that you put nationalistic next to racism probably tells me trying to get into a intellectual conversation about this though isn't going to get anywhere.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Being “nationalistic” and racists are two separate things.
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- sieabahlpark 8y ago
  Not "all" small towns are racist. Saying so is just ignorant. I also think of all the values small towns have these aren't the forefront.
  - 8y ago

69 points by boulos 8y ago

How about “stop being actively hostile to people”. Most rural areas are populated by anti-people people. They want some idea of “jobs”, meaning they want themselves to have higher quality higher compensated work. They don’t want anyone else to come there because “traffic”, “this place is full”, and “do you want this to be Manhattan? God forbid people not want to live in shoeboxes” and shit like that. They’re also usually homophobic, transphobic, racist, and xenophobic. It isn’t 90-10 but the true shift in society happens when you go 60-40 one way to the other. No one wants to live in this parochial backwater but them. Don’t trust me, ask Pew Research Centre. Anyway, all told, each region gets what they encourage. This 10% requirement is idiotic. If rural regions want tech jobs, they can stop sucking so badly.

zozbot123 8y ago
> How about “stop being actively hostile to people”. Most rural areas are populated by anti-people people. ... I don't buy this. Have you ever been to some of these places (let alone "most" of them) or are you just repeating self-serving urbanites' stereotypes? Villeinizing rural folks is a pastime as old as history itself.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Haha. Cool etymology reference. Yeah, man. I've lived in small towns in the South. I didn't make shit up. But why believe me. ? Go see how many rural people think marriage should be between a man and a woman. Go on. Convince yourself without my interference with a source you think is reputable. But if you'd rather I show you something, take a gander at this https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/record-percentage-americans-support-gay-marriage-poll-finds-n799376 https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/record-percentage-am... (47% for allowing in rural regions) And if you want to entertain yourself, narrow that to Republicans in the region and see what they think allowing gay marriage is for society http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/urban-suburban-and-rural-residents-views-on-key-social-and-political-issues/psd_05-22-18_community-type-02-03/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/urban-suburban-and... You can try to cozy up to them if you want. I'll call them what a straight majority of them are: homophobes. If the truth offends, the sin is in your eye.
  - general8bitso 8y ago
    rural != ‘The South’
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      That's right, trivially. I was in rural areas in The South. No person's experience of rural areas = The South because of the obviousness of the fact that the RHS is a larger set than the LHS and therefore the obvious set equivalence would mean that they are different. Fortunately, I have on the ground experience. But I don't even have to try that hard because we have surveys these days, and rural voters aren't afraid to show their homophobia. Also, as an aside, did you think people forgot Prop 8 so fast? It wasn't The Bay or LA that pushed that over the line.
- velobro 8y ago
  My parents moved to California from southeast Missouri, also known as "Missourah". As of this day we are the only ones in our family that don't live in Missouri/Tennessee/Arkansas. My Mom stopped taking my sister and I to visit on our 1 month breaks (elementary school track system) when I was about 12 due to the overall toxcicity of the rest of my family. They resented the fact that my father and her "left" and became succesful in the construction business during California's 80/90s housing boom. The mindset of the rural individual is that of jealousy. They want the opportunities of a big city where there are more people, but they don't "like" people. That's why they choose to live rural and have that become part of their identity. That "identity" is wholly incompatible with a densly populated area. This is why Trump is able to appeal to these people by promising them good economic fortunes without them having to change their way of life.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    > ... They want the opportunities of a big city where there are more people, but they don't "like" people. That's why they choose to live rural and have that become part of their identity. That "identity" is wholly incompatible with a densly populated area. ... Or maybe they just like living somewhere cheap and with plenty of space around them. You know, like anyone sensible would, other things being equal. It has nothing to do with them being misanthropes. Or are Chinese and Indian folks so much more empathetic than us Westerners also, because they live in such population density?
nvo 8y ago
Funny you call them prejudiced when, after reading this comment, it's clear you're the one who's prejudiced.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Haha, it's not prejudice when it's based in fact. If people don't want to be called homophobic, they have to just stop being against gay marriage. Wise enough to know it's wrong to be against gay marriage, not wise enough to stop being against it. What an interesting saddle point in the moral curve!
  - nvo 8y ago
    First, you're generalising, which is exactly what you complain they do. Second, they should be free to take any political stance that they want.
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      Oh they're welcome to it. But they aren't going to get the fancy jobs because no one wants to live with their insanity. Civil rights ain't just "political stance" homie. It's all right, though. Nobody is going to move tech jobs there so long as they stay evil. And it's not generalizing any more than saying that a cup of ice-cream that is 47% vanilla and 53% shit is shit ice-cream.

growtofill 8y ago

> Shame on us for shipping over 211,000 of these jobs offshore to countries like Malaysia and Brazil. Americans have an advantage in doing them because of a cultural understanding of what businesses need and a more convenient time zone. > When some of the Beckley students asked me what more they should do to bring tech, I joked that they would be wise to open up a few more Pakistani or Indian restaurants. So the idea is one should not be a valuable tech employee working for a US company from abroad, they should come to the country and wash the dishes for a few years first? No, thank you.

rndgermandude 8y ago
No >I saw that spark in the Beckley [W.Va] students, many from coal mining families It's quite the opposite: The joke was that the local US population should open those restaurants to attract tech talent to their towns.
general8bitso 8y ago
It was a bad cargo-culting joke.

general8bitso 8y ago

So, I believe the WVU Beckley campus was the formerly defunct Mountain State University. Closed in 2013.

hnaccy 8y ago

>Economists keep telling those left out of our digital future to move to the tech hubs. Sometimes I wonder if they have ever been to places like Jefferson, Iowa, or Beckley, W.Va. If they visit, they will realize that many people there are not looking to move. They are proud of their small-town values and enjoy being close to family. They brag that their town doesn’t need many traffic lights. Then they can enjoy the economic fruits of their small town.

pixl97 8y ago
Ah yes, only two choices. The economic desolation of small towns, or the over zoned asset inflated city. This surely end well.
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dang 8y ago
Please don't post shallow dismissals to HN. It degrades discussion and we're trying for better than that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jelliclesfarm 8y ago

Ro Khanna is my hometown progressive. So..obviously..I distrust the politician representing us. Why can’t he do a better job with our multitude of problems? Bay Area is choking. In more ways than one. Talking points is not the same as actually getting them done. It’s just a way to get elected. Again. Also..am I the only one who found the Indian-Pakistani restaurant quip offensive? This is why some of the rest of the country smirks at Californians. I am from the same region as he is..and I would NEVER make that comment in Beckley, W.Va. It’s just..well...rude.

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kevinconaway 8y ago
>Ro Khanna is my hometown progressive. So..obviously..I distrust the politician representing us. As someone not from the Bay Area, will you please explain why this is obvious? > Why can’t he do a better job with our multitude of problems? Perhaps because he has only been in Congress since 2016 and in that time, the Democrats have been in the minority and mostly powerless to do much of anything
- jelliclesfarm 8y ago
  Because local constituents have a front row seat wherein we hear what politicians say and what they do and how they do it. In any average Silicon Valley town(or college town for that matter) where there are more non voting residents than those who can vote, the policies are geared towards everyone and usually not in the interest of those who are long term residents and have voted and have paid taxes. So politicians have to deliver for both the voting and non voting constituents, but they have to convince the voters to choose what’s sometimes not in their best interest. This is the reason most politicians lie or back track. It is a most superior skill to be able to convince people to choose what isn’t in their best interest. In California..and especially the Silicon Valley mega region, politicians of all stripe have honed this skill to a fine art form.
  - 8y ago

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

If cities are rich because of high concentrations of capital and talent, then it really is a choice between living in a poor area and living in a rich one. You can’t make the poor areas rich without giving them qualities of the rich areas, at which point they simply switch over and become “big cities”.

thrwthrw93223 8y ago
How is it just a choice of living in a poor area vs a rich one? What if the people living in the poor areas don’t even have a high school degree? Can they suddenly decide they want to work and live in the rich area?
- chillacy 8y ago
  I’m a couple generations maybe. Moving from a poor area to a rich one and working your butt off for your kid’s education so they can reach professional successes you didn’t have the opportunity to is an archetypical immigrant story.
  - apocalypstyx 8y ago
    I'm convinced this is just another Protestant work ethic as secularized by capitalism, ala Max Weber. Each generation is supposed to work hard and devote everything (or almost everything) so their kids have it better, but who gets to say, I have it better, I'm not going to work hard anymore, so I can enjoy some of it? How the public general treats people who have amassed enough to live on but don't actively have a job, seems a testament to the religious foundations and origins of the idea, rather than anything drawn from what might be called reason.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  Yes, that has been happening for the last 150 years at least.
  - pixl97 8y ago

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eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

I come from a small town (a few thousand people). I was able to “get out” because I found a remote position. I think that is the cheapest way — for the employer and employee —- to lift these these places up.

chillacy 8y ago

Digital nomads will go to places like Thailand where CoL is cheap and internet is fast, I wonder if a small town could emulate that experience. Doesn’t have to be quite as cheap, but won’t give you food poisoning and could be safer too.

ForHackernews 8y ago
I think a big part of the reason (western) digital nomads go to Southeast Asia is for the tropical weather and exoticism. It would be hard for small town America to replicate those experiences.
- Retric 8y ago
  Exotic locations stop being so after you live in them for a few years. Time zone issues can end up as a real pain, which makes the US rather appealing. Weather wise most of Florida is really cheap and Hawaii can be surprisingly affordable a few miles from the beach. So, I suspect the digital nomads living in Asia stereotype is more about them being interesting than that many people actually doing so.
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    Hawai'i is "surprisingly affordable" only relative to the Bay Area. All labor is at first-world American rates and so many things have to be shipped in. Maybe it's an option for wealthy Silicon Valley escapees, but it's surely not a solution for the economic woes of middle America.
    - Retric 8y ago
      I am mostly talking digital nomads lifestyles. You can buy a nice 2br condo for 50k. That’s cheap compared to most major US cities. High speed internet for 50$/ month is generally available and you pay ~75c / lb to get computer equipment shipped out which is a minimal increase. Mostly it’s just food and energy prices that are a little high, but that’s not nessisarily a huge budget item. 40k is easily comfortable if you don’t need to travel or have kids. That said, the median income is also significantly higher than the rest of the US. And things get crazy if you want to live near the ocean, and travel regularly.

erikb 8y ago

Improvement to YOUR life always comes from YOU. If someone else does something it is to improve THEIR life. They will certainly tell you that it will be good for you, but in the end your advantage would only be a nice-to-have side effect. If you feel the money is passing you by without you getting a share then YOU need to find out how to change. For instance by learning how to do "tech stuff". And then, when there are a bunch of people who really want to improve actual problems arise. E.g. universities being too expensive for them. Even free online courses require some level of basic skill to start use them. How to get the funds for the equipment. And of course the technicl infrastructure to provide electricity, infrastructure and basic living needs one can't provide for when one spends 10 hours crunching technical problems. These are problems I hoped to find answers for in the article, or at least suggestions. People being too proud to accept the new status quo and hoping for more icing on their apparently already tasty enough cake before they start moving their asses, that is nothing. Even if they get it they won't start moving. Cake makes fat and lazy. I personally feel a lot of the mid-level towns in Western countries (not just in the US of A) actually have a good starting point. Roads and trains are already government supported and therefore good enough quality or better. Super markets and a few restaurants are there already as well. Internet is there, although it's maybe not the highest speed. Schools and libraries have some computers and wifi access if they want to. Office rent and land prices are cheap. Also with the internet location itself is less and less important, which is why so many administrative and create jobs can be outsourced. They could be outsourced to your town as well, if you could find a way to compete. No need to be close to natural resources, in a trade hub like a coastal town, etc. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with road and internet access is totally fine to start competing. The only thing that is really missing badly is people moving their asses. They have a tv and enough money to buy beer. The car repair every once in a while is quite painful, but otherwise they don't feel motivated to do anything with their life. Some won't even travel to a nearby coastal town for a weekend on the beach or something. In the meantime I'm friends with a Chinese cook who works for $100/month a 14h/7day cooking job and then after that at home spends time learning how to code to make more money and work fewer hours. I mean, if our rural folks could get up to do half of that, then they would be able to work a $50k remote work web/app developer position in no time, and boom they are part of the "tech elite".

paulsutter 8y ago

More remote-first companies are the best way to bring jobs everywhere. Remote-first working is a separate and new skill that needs to be developed.

ascar 8y ago
I'm not sure that there is enough demand for remote work. Many people enjoy and even require the social interactions provided at a workplace and don't want solitary remote work.
- paulsutter 8y ago
  “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” — Western Union internal memo, 1876. “The problem of TV was that people had to glue their eyes to a screen, and that the average American wouldn’t have time for it.” − The New York Times, 1939
- dbattaglia 8y ago
  I’m currently at my third remote job. The first time, I was 29, newly single and I found it got old real fast. Moving back to an office environment was a major improvement for me. Fast forward 10 years, I’m married again, different living situation (in the city now) and I absolutely love the freedom and lifestyle of working remote again. There are a ton of factors involved but I suspect I’m not alone in finding remote work more appealing as I get older and more settled.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Much younger me worked in a very different environment with respect to communications, information availability, etc. of course. But I still can't really envision newly graduated me hanging out in my apartment and just communicating using my (then-nonexistent) laptop. Today, I attend a lot of events, go into an office sometimes, have some off-sites, etc. But I'm much less interested in day-to-day coffees, lunches, work sports leagues, etc. than I once was.

LeanderK 8y ago

well, germany is quite spread out and has lots of tech in smaller towns. It's not always perfect and we are also struggeling with some things, but I think a few approaches can be emulated. First, I think it's important that the small town is not on it's own, but in a close neighborhood of other smaller towns with which it's cooperating a lot. For a serious tech economy, even small towns need a working ecosystem (and I think can't be too small). They have to specialize, cooperate and develop the needed ecosystem, so that they can reach "critical mass" in some area. Ideally, this includes a small university nearby, so that there's a cooperation between the task of education and employement and the specialized, needed workforce can be trained. Also, research-institutes, which help small businesses which can't fund a research division on their own, are important. In germany, they are often coupled with thematic industrial clusters, a smaller patch of land where the city tries to get all the industry together. The research-institutes in germany are the Frauenhofer-institutes, public-private partnerships of applied reasearch with a focus and goal of supporting the local economy. For example, the small town of Hof in bavaria with a population of 45.000. It has a university of applied science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hof_University_of_Applied_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hof_University_of_Applied_Scie...), which is focused on educating the workforce suitable to the local economy (often in close cooperation). There's some research going on in the university, but it's not a research intensive one. Since the textile-industry in Hof is quite strong, there's a Frauenhofer cooperating with the university of applied science nearby (https://www.htl.fraunhofer.de/en/manufacturing-processes/textile-engineering.html https://www.htl.fraunhofer.de/en/manufacturing-processes/tex...). TLDR: I think tech in smaller towns is possible, but it needs a specialized economy, not too-small towns and a close cooperation between the public and private. Tech won't come by itself, it needs to be lured.

cmrdporcupine 8y ago
From my experience visiting, Germany does a much better job of getting services into smaller communities. From Mainz, where my family lives, we took streetcar and then bus out into surrounding villages and towns which would be totally un-serviced by transit if they were in North America -- even in areas where the population density is equivalent or higher (such as where I live in southern Ontario). Tech infrastructure is only one part of it. North America's rural economy is broken due to land use and industry problems. Once you get out of exurbia or areas that are appealing as retirement or vacation homes, the land is mostly just swathes of cash crop mega farms and towns mostly disappearing due to lack of jobs. Europe's mostly small towns predate the industrial revolution and the green revolution. They have cultural and economic roots that seem to have persisted better through the 20th century's transformations.

rayiner 8y ago

There was a big push to wire up rural areas in the early 2000s. It didn’t happen everywhere, but it happened in quite a few places that can serve as data points. Here in Maryland there is quite a bit of municipal fiber covering the areas Verizon FiOS doesn’t. Some of it has been in place since the early 2000s. Are those communities with fiber doing better than those without it, economically? They’re not doing any better than their neighbors without fiber. The limiting factor isn’t the availability of bandwidth, it’s the lack of desire to hire anyone from these places for remote work. This is not a “build it and they will come” situation. Many places built it. Nobody came. People have these unfounded romantic notions about fiber and economic development. Here in Maryland, more than 60% of households have access to fiber. Has it revolutionized the economy? Not at all. Annapolis is a small city (pop. 40,000) that has had fiber more than a decade and almost all the tech jobs here are connected to the Navy (and we’re already here). What do people do with fiber here? Netflix. Fiber is not a catalyst for job creation and economic growth. It’s a means for content consumption. That makes it an awful investment of public dollars.

oculusthrift 8y ago
i think it’s perfectly fine to invest public money on things that improve everyone’s lives. for me and and many others fiber provides a much higher quality of living even if it doesn’t bring extra growth economically.
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msla 8y ago
> This is not a “build it and they will come” situation. Many places built it. Nobody came. Yes, sadly, paved roads are not a magical fairy dust. No, wait... electrification isn't a fairy dust. My mistake. No, wait... phones aren't magic. No, wait... /s
bcherny 8y ago
Could it be that you need to first invest in fiber, then you need to invest in other things like small business incentives and attracting VC?

jonstewart 8y ago

There are several comments here noting that small towns are pretty well wired. I’m fortunate to have just purchased a vacation home in rural Wisconsin (close to family). In DC, I have 100Mbps fiber, a free upgrade from FiOS from the 25Mbps I ordered, with the option to get a gigabit. At my other house, I have a 6Mbps DSL that only delivers 1.5Mbps at best, with a couple hundred Kbps upload. There’s a cell tower only a mile away, but hills and trees obscure the signal; still with two bars I can get 20Mbps on my iPhone. Can I get a reasonable data plan? No. All the data plans cost a lot for a little, and throttle you to 2G after a hundred GB or so of download per month. My hope is to spend a good portion of every summer working remotely in Wisconsin. I’ll be hard-pressed to make video conferences and pairing sessions work, and I sure won’t be streaming many shows for entertainment in the evenings.

rayiner 8y ago
Why didn’t you buy a vacation home in a place that’s better wired? We stayed at an AirBnB is Putnam County, NY recently that had very solid 100 Mbps cable. You can get 100 Mbps cable throughout Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Easton, a town of 15,000, is upgrading its municipal cable system to gigabit. What does it say about the importance of high-speed broadband access as a differentiating factor that even someone in the tech industry will move somewhere without it? Is that a compelling fact for towns like Easton who believe that investing in municipal broadband will attract more residents?
- jonstewart 8y ago
  Your question comes across as a bit rude. To answer it, because after half a year of looking, it was far closer to the ideal across a range of factors than anything else we’d found. I didn’t really notice how terrible the DSL was until after we purchased. The Eastern Shore in Maryland can be pretty rural, but it’s still Maryland. Euston is 15,000; my place is between two villages, one of 900 and the other of 1600. In town, Internet access _is_ pretty decent. But the countryside is another matter. Cities are economic powerhouses because they have network effects. My career has benefited from those network effects, and I think it would be a personal mistake for me to convert to a 100% remote position. But I can leverage a bit of that career capital to be remote sometime and take advantage of the vast cost differences between a coastal city and the rural Midwest, and get some lifestyle advantages from it (most importantly having my children see their extended family members far more frequently). I am going to have to invest a decent amount in equipment and services (e.g., MiFi, antenna, a router that’ll support line sharing with the cell, VPS, etc.) to make it work. That’s not to say “poor me,” far from it, but simply to point out that rural broadband can really suck in some places. And I’m lucky in that the cell signal exists; lots of places it doesn’t.

RickJWagner 8y ago

What a nice article. I'm a programmer living in a rural area (and am usually politically conservative.) I really didn't expect to see such an article in the NYT, especially authored by a politician from the left side of the aisle. Brings a good start to 2019. Thanks, Rep. Khanna!

thaumaturgy 8y ago

I was one part of a group of people who worked hard for several years to try to nurture a growing a tech scene in a rural area not far from Sacramento. I stepped away from that almost two years ago and my current thinking is it can't be done, not just because we largely failed at it but because there are a number of other towns trying to do the same and they aren't getting traction either. I wonder if a healthy tech economy isn't more of an emergent behavior, and it tends to emerge in cities because there are more people, more resources, and more opportunities all mixing together. You need good communications infrastructure, not just fiber but cellular too. If all you have available is satellite or (gulp) DSL, it's really painful to get work done. But that requires an enormous financial investment, especially in rural areas where RoI-per-mile is mostly negative. Often the rural areas already have a culture there, and that culture doesn't necessarily want to get along with tech. Here, cellular providers can't deploy new towers because too many people are convinced that they'll get cancer, including some members of city council. Rural areas will tend to be mostly populated by people who either moved to get away from the city, or have never experienced life in a city. For those people, there's very little about a strong tech scene that sounds marketably attractive. That also means that the talent just isn't there. And talent isn't there in part because opportunity isn't there. And opportunity isn't there because talent and infrastructure aren't there. Nobody wants to just pump half a billion dollars or more into a small town just to see what shakes out, and if you did, you'd probably only end up ruining everything that made it an attractive enough small town to experiment with in the first place. This is all really a shame, because it's contributing to a lot of the political and economic divide in this country, as rural areas are neglected, and shrink, and die slow deaths, while people all jostle for tiny amounts of space at high cost in dense population centers.

lsc 8y ago
I grew up in a rural area near Sacramento. Culture is your big problem; when I was there, reading in public was "gay" and grounds for a (light) beating/physical humiliation. Of course, I was in high school at the time, and high school is terrible everywhere; I'm sure it's different for adults. But, point being, at least in the '90s, it was not a place that encourages you to study or engage in intellectual pursuits.

LyndsySimon 8y ago

Education is not the issue, in my experience - career opportunities are. I work remotely and live in a rural area. To get my career to the point where I could reliably find remote work, I moved to Charlottesville, VA for five years. Meanwhile, of the 20 or so people I’ve tracked down with two-year degrees intended to train them for tech jobs, exactly zero have done so. The primary problem that I see is that no one wants to hire a remote junior developer. Senior, sure, but never junior.

ghaff 8y ago
Speaking as someone who mostly works remotely (after multiple decades of working in an office most of the time), I have a lot of trouble envisioning coming out of school and sitting in an apartment at my computer all day. Sure, there are consulting jobs where you spend most of your days at a client site or otherwise don't work from an office much. Perhaps had I had a job like that I'd feel differently. But going straight from school to a fully remote engineering position would, I think, have been very difficult for me.
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  It would have been for me, too - without the school, though, as I didn’t graduate. That’s my point. Where does someone in a rural area get the experience to make that transition effectively?

scarface74 8y ago

... They are proud of their small-town values .... And this part of the issue. I come from a small town. The “values” of small towns are racist, homophopic, and nationalistic. I’ve known many people who moved away, started dating someone of another race and then come back home with their significant other and feel completely out of place - not because of family, but because of the city. I’ve also had gay relatives who refuse to visit family back home but welcome them to come to where they live in a larger city. I’m Black and in conversations, when I tell people where I live - an infamous “sundown town” as recently as the 80s - the first thing I hear is “why do you want to live around all of those White folks”. People don’t understand how much of an anachronism small town America is. The brain drain is real, young people who are capable can’t wait to move as soon as possible to experience more of the world. I can’t imagine anyone who is not a native born American ever wanting to live there.

shard972 8y ago
> And this part of the issue. I come from a small town. The “values” of small towns are racist, homophopic, and nationalistic. As someone that comes from small towns and lives in the city, I find city dwellers to be much more racist and judging than rural folk. The fact that you put nationalistic next to racism probably tells me trying to get into a intellectual conversation about this though isn't going to get anywhere.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Being “nationalistic” and racists are two separate things.
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sieabahlpark 8y ago
Not "all" small towns are racist. Saying so is just ignorant. I also think of all the values small towns have these aren't the forefront.
- 8y ago