23 ms·

Let People Move to Jobs

134 points by luu 7y ago

mnm1 7y ago
> People expected telecommuting to change this, but even though we have many technical tools that make remote work far more practical than it was even ten years ago, physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable. Not for software development. I'm sure there are plenty of industries where this is true. Software just isn't one of them. In fact, I'd argue the opposite for most software companies. They suffer from poor work and poor working conditions due to locating everyone in one location.
- eropple 7y ago
  I'm happy to work for a company that embraces remote work, but it's undeniably more efficient and, for most people, fulfilling on a personal level to have a high-bandwidth face-to-face conversation--and "the wifi hiccuped, what did you say?", as happens here and without exception everywhere else I've been, isn't that.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - hashkb 7y ago
    > undeniably more efficient No. It's debatable. Many believe remote work is undeniably more efficient and the fulfillment you feel from high bandwidth conversations is a delusion.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      Regardless of how good a substitute you feel remote communication is in general, the effect of network problems and such is an objective fact, not anyone's opinion or delusion. Also, if we stipulate that my fulfillment from being in the office is irrelevant, that doesn't change the fact that other people will not conform to my preferred mode of communication. I'm fine with instant messaging, and a lot of people are, but in my experience, a majority don't or won't use it well.
      - hashkb 7y ago
        I've been working remotely for 5 years. Left the Bay Area last year. Network problems have not been an issue. Comcast goes down for a day.. I tether. Are we really saying latency and the occasional video freeze is worth forcing the whole company to commute to the office? And live within an hour or so of everyone else? The people who suck at communicating online suck in person too. At least online there's a record of who can't read or spell. And don't get me started on the hours I've had to wait while someone is in the hallway having a chat.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        The people we're talking about are people whose entire job is communication. They're people persons. What don't you understand about that? I don't get to dictate how they work. Anyway, I have other reasons for not wanting to work remotely too. I've seen many comments on HN from people that are very sure that the ideal for anyone technical is a private office that's utterly silent and undisturbed for concentration. That isn't me. I do get irritable if someone is having a long non-work conversation that's barely loud enough to be distracting, but I don't want to be shut up in a closet. People derive value from asking me stuff and vice versa.
  - mnm1 7y ago
    Sure, the communication might be more fulfilling--the efficiency is debatable--for certain people but at a cost of the quality and quantity of work suffering, the commute, time wasted, money wasted on office rent, certain supplies, parking, lunch, tolls, etc.
  - thatcat 7y ago
    That's just an argument for government subsidized fiber internet, repeating your self a few times a day is a minor inconvenience compared to commuting.
    - igammarays 7y ago
      Some of the best work happens not during scheduled meetings, but in spontaneous conversations with coworkers at random times during the day. Fiber internet doesn't solve that.
      - pkalinowski 7y ago
        You know, you can send a message to your coworker: "5 min call?" and BAM! One click of a button and you are talking live.
- seltzered_ 7y ago
  You can also have poor work and poor working conditions in a remote environment - depends on how the team and yourself operate. A phrase I often tell friends who transition into indie work or remote work is a Merlin Mann phrase "You are your own worst manager". Even if you want to argue this isn't true, developers still seem to end up in cities for the sake of networking. (bias: I've been working remotely for ~7 years and had trouble justifying a move to a smaller off-corridor city)
  - mnm1 7y ago
    Sure it's not a panacea for poor work. But it does allow one much more flexibility in terms of working conditions. Having a private space is now the default. That alone is an incredible change especially for knowledge workers. Not being subjected to the noise and distractions of others is huge as is being able to set up one's own office as one wants. As far as moving to smaller cities, that's hardly related to remote work or anything but labor laws when they favor employers so heavily as they do in the US. With zero job security, of course you'll stay in or around a major metro area. That's just common sense and won't change without legislation. It's not tech specific either. But in tech, you can pretty much move to any city in the world that will allow you to work. Hardly immobile.
remote_phone 7y ago
The author made a blind guess that 80% of Google would quit If they moved HQ without any actual evidence. If Google opened up a new large office in a place like Kansas City with no salary cut and a strong internet presence and some other tech companies (ICE exchange for example), I bet enough Google employees would want to move there to make it worthwhile. Cheaper cost of living, better schools, better for families etc. plus alternatives If you get tired of working at Google but probably not since your lifestyle would be so much better than the Bay Area. I know a lot of people that are very sick of the Bay Area, especially those with kids.
- malandrew 7y ago
  With no salary cuts would be amazing. So long as the policy is transparent for new hires in the new market, you would only need to grandfather people those that make the move. There are tons of places I’d move to easily if I could keep my current SF salary.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Since your salary would go much further outside of SF, why would it be necessary to keep the same salary?
    - tomnipotent 7y ago
      Does Google make the same profit regardless? Yup, I think it's necessary.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        What does Google's profit have to do with your salary needs?
        unlinked_dll 7y ago
        As Publilius Syrus put it, "everything is worth what it's purchaser will pay." Why should google be willing to pay less for continued labor after relocating if profits are unaffected? And if they're not, why would anyone keep working there?
cagenut 7y ago
The housing costs of some second/third/worse tier city are almost completely meaningless. Unless the job gave me a 10 year contract with a golden parachute or something. It doesn't matter if you can make the numbers work once, what matters is that you will almost certainly job hop 3 - 5 times, so you need to be in an area dense with employers to make that viable without having to move your life/family every time. Even if you never wind up changing jobs, the fact that you could matters, you're not completely fucked if things go south with one company. They don't own you (as much).
- perl4ever 7y ago
  It seems to me that you're coming from a perspective where you don't have any roots at the time of your first job. I think it might be good to step back and realize while that may describe a lot of people who go off to college some place and then take a job anywhere, surely there are millions for whom it's not true. And 5-10 years in, if you are unmarried and change your mind, you can't necessarily make it work then for a number of reasons, including that in a hot tech area, you're already old and therefore useless.
- dbcurtis 7y ago
  Winner, winner, chicken dinner. That goes twice if your significant other also has a similar career trajectory.
- chrisfrantz 7y ago
  This statement could be made in a job where remote work doesn’t exist, but thankfully it does. There’s more than enough work out there.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    Then why is the article talking about where the jobs should be? If this was actually a reality then this post wouldn't exist.
- jayd16 7y ago
  Exactly. Who wants to live in a company town? I don't.
hashkb 7y ago
> even though we have many technical tools that make remote work far more practical than it was even ten years ago, physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable. I've seen this artificially enforced by executives who refuse to engage in a discussion about remote work. There are a lot of them, and until they feel comfortable managing remotely, remote workers can't flourish. So it's nothing to do with the nature or quality of remote work. We just don't have enough truly remote friendly execs.
tehjoker 7y ago
Just... eliminate the private housing market. Unlike companies that produce things, there's zero value add by landlords and banks. Rents and mortgages far exceed the value of construction and allow the richest people to snap them up. Make it more fair, and cheaper by eliminating landlords and private sales of land. The land was all stolen anyway.
- war1025 7y ago
  Value is absolutely added by both, and suggesting otherwise is pretty naive. Landlords take on the responsibility for long-term ownership and maintenance of a property and give people access to it on a shorter term basis that is much easier to get out of. Banks give access to money that you don't currently have with understanding that you will pay them back a premium over time for that service. If you "eliminated landlords and private sale of land", you would pretty quickly end up with a system consisting of landlords and private sale of land, maybe under a new names.
  - logicchains 7y ago
    In mainland China, before the communist revolution landlords used to be called "dizhu" (literally "land lord"). The name took on bad connotations (the communist revolutionaries didn't take kindly to landlords), and nowadays they're called "fangdong" instead. Apart from the fact that the land is technically on a 99 year lease from the government not owned, a "fangdong" is still pretty much the same as a landlord anywhere else.
  - sgift 7y ago
    > Banks give access to money that you don't currently have with understanding that you will pay them back a premium over time for that service. By using money that they don't have either. I think that part is important to remember. The difference between a bank and a private person is not that the bank has money to lend. It's that they are allowed to lend money they don't have. If you do that it's called fraud.
    - aguyfromnb 7y ago
mike50 7y ago
This only applies to garbage tier cites that should either be bulldozed or if near a city that people want to live in just be annexed.
m0zg 7y ago
For most of us here, there's no reason to move anywhere at all. Programmers can work from anywhere in the world. We need to let go of the idea that "work" means 2 hours of commute and sitting in an open plan under constant barrage of interruptions for 40 hours a week. We need to let go of _all_ the components of this definition, from "40 hours" to "office" to "commute". There are jobs which have to be done in the office only. Programming is not one of those jobs.
- titanomachy 7y ago
  Maybe it's because I'm relatively young, but I actually like working in an office. I bike 15 minutes to work rather than commuting 2 hours, because my work pays me enough to live close by. I spend some of my time collaborating closely with smart people who are a lot more experienced than me, which seems to be the fastest way to learn. I spend then rest of the time with headphones on facing the corner of the open office, hopefully getting absorbed in my work to the point where I'm not too distracted by the people around me. I eat free food that's better than anything I could make at home. I've had periods of working from home in my life and they've been lonely and unproductive in comparison. My only point is that there _are_ some people who genuinely prefer working at an office.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    And those people can come to the office. But it should really not be a requirement, and work should be structured in such a way as to not penalize people who are remote: around written communication, with infrequent teleconferencing.
    - stkdump 7y ago
      I think the problem is that as soon as everyone who has the opportunity to leave the office does so, the training effect for new developers is gone. It might be better for you and your personal performance, but is it better for the company overall? That might not be so clear cut, and one of the reasons why especially big tech is so hesitant -- as opposed to companies that rely on the perk of remote work to be able to attract talent or pay less.
systematical 7y ago
The article mentions DC and I'd just like vent about how miserable a place this is to live in. I see some people spend 10 hours a week and often more just commuting to work. It's overpriced. And when you look at the state of IT in the federal government you realize why this government fails so badly at non-tech things. I'll be running away from the major cities as fast as possible as soon as possible. Yuck. You actually lose money working in DC, the salaries aren't even worth.
- cowsandmilk 7y ago
  > You actually lose money working in DC, the salaries aren't even worth. People around DC have such low salaries that they are among the richest counties in the country... https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/census-bureau-5-richest-counties-are-dc-suburbs https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/censu...
  - humanrebar 7y ago
    That just proves that there's a certain class of rich people (diplomats? lawyers?) that have plenty of work in the D.C. area and they've carved some neighborhoods out for themselves. It doesn't prove anything about what life for a DBA in D.C. would be like.
    - cowsandmilk 7y ago
      Glassdoor shows the pay for DBAs in the DC area are above the national average. For software developers, the median salaries are below those in SF and Seattle, but if you are a FAANG level engineer, Amazon’s pay scale in NOVA is identical to Seattle and Facebook pays similarly. > carved some neighborhoods out for themselves This is an effort to imply that the suburbs of DC with high median salaries are small enclaves. This could not be further from the truth. Fairfax County, which has the third highest median household income in the US, is over a million in population and the largest county in VA. Montgomery County is the largest county in Maryland, also over a million people. So these counties are not separated from the rest of the metro area, but instead have over 2 million people in an MSA of 6 million.
neilwilson 7y ago
This argument has been made for decades. Isn't it about time we realised that people live somewhere amongst social capital they have built up throughout their lives. And therefore business capital should move where the people are - to avoid damaging that social capital. Not the other way around. Ultimately people work to live. Those who live to work are a tiny minority. With modern technology there is little excuse. Fewer and fewer enterprises require physical concentration to operate.
- ljf 7y ago
  This - and to add to that, the high value of this social capital when you have lower financal capital. Someone to help with the kids, relax with, help you fix your car, have a cheap evening or weekend of hanging out with. When you move it can take years to build all that up again. You might be able to do without it all, but you either have to pay to replace it or go without.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    But that implies we should centralize in cities, so people don't have to move if they lose their jobs. Getting a few companies to a small town just means that when one fails, workers are more likely to have to move at a later stage in life, when they already have kids and a mortgage and such. Better for them to move to a hub when they're young. Plus their children will already be born in a hub, so they won't have to move at all.
    - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
      I agree with what you said but how many people can afford to have families in hubs like you assume?
      - jefftk 7y ago
        (author) The main reason it's expensive is because supply restrictions have pushed housing far above the cost of construction. We could fix this by allowing more construction, which is what I'm arguing for in the post.
atemerev 7y ago
I wonder why 100% remote positions and companies are still marginal. Software engineering is one of the few industries where remote work is possible, and yet hardly available, despite obvious advantages.
- rocqua 7y ago
  In my experience, remote work remains less effective than being physically present. Especially if you are never present. It just makes coordination and socialization so much more difficult.
- ozim 7y ago
  Because remote is hard, if it would be just about typing code then yes you could live in igloo in Greenland. You need people who are able to work remotely together. It is not only about having really smart devs who can grasp how to do Y with tech Z. It is also about having really smart managers and really smart company owners. Building such a team takes years, it is not like you can hire 10 devs, a manager and dump loads of cash on them to build a product. First you have to get all those different people to trust each other. Then there are differences in ideas how things should be done, it is hard to solve some of those when people are in the same room. People have different temperaments, they have different ambitions. We have all the technology to communicate but people have problems with stating their ideas in clear way in writing. Calling might help a bit, but to build trust you have to work with someone face to face and go trough rough times together.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's worth trying. For an industry so ostensibly focused on innovation and experimentation, much of tech remains as conservative as any other in terms of trying out new ways of work. Though certainly there are some bright spots opening up to remote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21764110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21764110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19444960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19444960
    - 7y ago
jillesvangurp 7y ago
People move to where the economic activity is. Typically the best and most in demand skills go first because they get payed extra. This re-enforces the importance of these areas. That's how big cities emerged. They are concentrations of people with skills and supporting infrastructure. Despite the cost of living (which is insane), San Francisco is still attractive to software companies because of the insane numbers of people with software skills in the area. IMHO there are a few things that are accelerating this: 1) dropping cost of of transport (clean energy, autonomous driving/flying, etc.) this will allow people to move more efficiently and more often and with less guilt about environmental concerns. 2) improving tooling for remote work. 3) co-working spaces and other flexible work infrastructure. 4) the gig economy, work, living, eating, transport, it's basically all people outsourcing things to each other.
6c696e7578 7y ago
I've never understood why with IT jobs in the UK that they're all centred around London. Especially when they then offshore bits of the company to India or Eastern/Southern Europe requiring contracted staff to use a VPN. It seems companies want staff onsite in London, purely for the enjoyment of making people commute there. This does no good for the environment other than help to conversion of fossil fuel into co². If people are to be managed in things like "sprints" or other ticket monitoring/work managing systems then there's no reason why people can't work from home so long as they're happy to communicate on normal daily/weekly management calls. Bring on telecommuting, it works for and helps everyone.
- laputan_machine 7y ago
  There's a push to make less expensive northern cities (Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool) appealing for tech. London still has (and will do for the foreseeable future) the lion's share, but there plenty of good tech jobs up north.
  - ck425 7y ago
    Same with the Scottish central belt. There are plenty of good jobs up here. Part of the reason for the London centricness is that relatively few people realise just how many good jobs there are outside of London.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      All the jobs are a few clicks away from being found. London probably offers quite a few amenities that people want, even though they hate many aspects of it. One of the crucial amenities a big city provides is security that if you lose an income stream, you will be able to get another easily. How much are people willing to pay for that?
      - ck425 7y ago
        If you're a software engineer that security exists in every major city. Plus the cost of living to salary ratio is so much better that it's far easier to save an emergency fund.
arendtio 7y ago
To me, it sounds as simple as everybody does what he thinks is best for him: 1. Companies are founded in the big cities, to have access to talent 2. People move to big cities to have access to better jobs As long as the benefits outweigh the cost, the chances are small that anything changes...
- jefftk 7y ago
  Where this simple model fails is that existing residents oppose the construction of additional housing. Housing prices rise, fewer people can afford to move there, and renters with lower paying jobs get forced out.
generalpass 7y ago
I wonder how the numbers will shake out for the McKesson Corporation move from San Francisco to Irving, Texas.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
cowsandmilk 7y ago
People always talk about HQ2 being in Dc (and formerly NYC) but they simultaneously announced 5,000 jobs in Nashville. [0] https://www.newschannel5.com/news/amazon-in-nashville-what-is-an-operations-center-of-excellence https://www.newschannel5.com/news/amazon-in-nashville-what-i...
esotericn 7y ago
The whole idea of remote working to arbitrage cost of living falls apart if you are in any way social. I think that a lot of people banging on about remote work just haven't tried it for an extended period. It works for some, and for those - great. To me, it's just another step down the 'technification' of everything in which people don't speak to the people around them (because they've been 'removed' from their lives) but spend all of their time in front of screens. I don't want to live in the middle of nowhere and earn 10x what the average local does. I want the people around me to be roughly on my level and share my interests. That's something that's easy to do in a city. That's how businesses end up centering in hubs anyway. Who wants to be a startup founder living in the country alone? I'm sure this person exists, but they're the exception not the rule. I mean, right now, you can look at a place like London and see hyperlocal clustering of wealth, one street will be the 'nice street' and the next one rough. People really care about this. If you earned a London salary in my hometown you'd be ostracising yourself completely from those around you by virtue of just having none of the same concerns. Yeah, you own the home outright, you can buy a brand new car every 6 months, the price tags in the supermarket may as well be blank, etc. Oh yeah, and you have working hours whenever you want, booking a holiday is telling your boss "I won't be in Friday, guv". Wait until your neighbour tells you again how they're struggling to pay the bills or they've just been sanctioned by the benefits office. I don't see how that benefits anyone.
- gurkendoktor 7y ago
  > The whole idea of remote working to arbitrage cost of living falls apart if you are in any way social. Unless you grew up in the area from which you work remotely, in which case you can be more social because connecting with old friends and family is much easier than making new friends at 30+. > If I earned a London salary in my hometown I'd be ostracising myself completely from those around me [...] I don't see how that benefits anyone. I don't see the problem with having more money than most of your neighbors - instead of buying new cars, you could spend it on your neighborhood and lift it up. Seems healthier than what is happening instead - non-techies being forced out of their homes because they can't keep up with techie rents.
  - 7y ago
solatic 7y ago
This is a classic example of a situation where the interests of individuals and companies are not aligned with the wider national interest. Yes, it makes tremendous economic sense for people and companies to co-locate in cities. In a country where individuals have a choice to live in an urban or a rural environment, and their demonstrated preference is to live in an urban environment, then urbanization becomes a self-reinforcing positive economic spiral. However, this spiral is offset by a negative economic spiral in rural areas. As the national currency appreciates due to the increasing competitiveness of urban centers, rural industry becomes less and less competitive. When a national economy is in a downturn, the central bank can devalue the national currency to improve the price-competitiveness of national products for export; however, rural economies don't have this option as they share a currency with urban centers. So rural communities continue their downward economic spiral. Why is this a problem? If we could force the rural laggards to move to urban centers, or if rural populations didn't hold outsize influence over the political process, it wouldn't be. But we can neither coerce rural depopulation nor can we make that kind of political change. So the situation continues. Unfortunately, there will be a price to pay. Increasing political polarization leads to civil conflict. The EU narrowly avoided collapse by bailing out the Greeks - the US Congress has been practicing "bailouts" for a century (at least) with pork-barrel legislation. So let people move to jobs - as long as they're cognizant that their taxes will continue to go back where they came from.
codekansas 7y ago
There's at least one large tech company that has located themselves totally outside the typical tech hubs - Epic Systems, in Madison. I interviewed for them after graduation but ended up taking a job at Facebook in Seattle. The offer was for half my current salary. They tried to argue that with the cost of living adjustment I could buy a house, but what 22-year-old wants to buy a house? Locating in Madison is kind of a physical manifestation of their business strategy - avoid any competition, pay sub-market rates and issue strict, possibly non-enforceable non-compete clauses. It works for people who really want to live in the Midwest. I think there's a spectrum between "live to work" and "work to live", and I think most ambitious college grads actually want many opportunities, for a while at least.
- lipstone 7y ago
  Quite frankly, I think Epic Systems realizes it can't compete with Facebook. But the value is much better in comparison to many non-FAANG Bay Area companies. I was actually in a similar situation, where Capital One offered 90K for Richmond, VA and it seemed better than ~120k offer in the Bay Area. But then I got a Google offer and stopped considering both of the others. The high-CoL companies really only make sense financially if you're in the upper tiers of pay (and/or on the path to reaching that level of pay).
- opportune 7y ago
  It’s also part of their strategy to churn through 22-25 year olds by overworking them in their first jobs out of college when they likely don’t have as many family obligations or well calibrated expectations for what work-life balance entails. And it saves them money since they don’t have to promote that many people to senior positions. There are plenty of other companies outside big tech hubs, you just don’t hear about them as much and they don’t recruit the same way a lot of other tech companies do. For example, Epic’s competitor Cerner is in Kansas City which many people on this post are using as an example of a cheap place with a small tech scene, despite Cerner employing over 10K
foxhop 7y ago
I work remotely for the past 6 years and will likely never have an office job again. I live in my home town and have worked for start ups in Santa Monica, San Francisco, Boston, and New York. I live in Eastern Connecticut, which is the side on the state that people often do not know about. It's a 2.5 hour drive to New York or Boston. It's not as affluent as the weat side, close to New York. I do a lot of gardening when the weather permits. https://russell.ballestrini.net/how-to-work-from-home-the-road-to-remote-chapter-1/ https://russell.ballestrini.net/how-to-work-from-home-the-ro...
mwcampbell 7y ago
I believe we in the software industry have a moral duty to pursue remote, distributed work, as much as possible, for a few reasons: The software that runs the world should be developed by people living all over the world, not just people who can move to a few cities. To me, this is part of real diversity. We talk about gathering requirements for software. Well, it's easier to do it when the people developing the software are as diverse as possible. Limiting these jobs to people who are willing and able to move to one of the tech hubs is bound to limit some kinds of diversity. People should be free to live in and support their local communities. I think a lot of the political polarization that has been building up lately, particularly in the US, is between the "elites" in big cities and the "regular people" in the rest of the country. We should try to reduce that gap. Of course, people who find their local community intolerable should be free to move elsewhere. Remote work, especially when it's primarily text-based, is also more equitable for people with disabilities. Blind people benefit somewhat from the fact that nobody is relying on facial expressions or body language (assuming video calls aren't a routine thing). For people with other kinds of disabilities, the benefits can be far greater. What would you do if a deaf person or a person with a severe speech impediment applied for a job on your on-site team? Well, if you're primarily using text, it's not as big an issue. Sure, we can always accommodate specific people with specific disabilities, but it's better if the normal way of doing things already works for them. Disclosure: I currently work at Microsoft, on the main Redmond campus. So call me a hypocrite if you like. But I honestly think I'm doing a lot of good where I'm at, since I work on the Windows accessibility team. I do sometimes bring up the subject of remote work with my colleagues. And whenever I move on, I will probably insist that my next job be remote.
cryptica 7y ago
>> If Google announced it was moving everything to Pittsburgh, ~80% of the company would quit. They don't have to move everything to Pittsburgh, they could just open a small office there and give their employees the option to move there. >> People expected telecommuting to change this, but even though we have many technical tools that make remote work far more practical than it was even ten years ago, physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable. I think office politics are to blame for this. Remote people are often more productive than those who are on-site but they are less likely to be promoted in a mixed envrionment. That's why it's often better if everyone is remote; then everyone has equal opportunity. >> Good ideas flow more freely between organizations So do bad ideas. Bad ideas backed by a lot of money spread like the plague. >> Coordination between organizations is easier So that they can make cartels which erode workers' rights and monopolize industries. >> Switching jobs is easier, so people don't get as stuck in jobs they don't like They can be forced to live in a horrible place that they hate, but at least they can distract themselves from their misery by changing companies all the time to give themselves the illusion of hope. >> Ease of switching also allows people to take larger career risks To the point that everyone in your workplace is focused on risky career politics instead of producing actual value.
- jefftk 7y ago
  > They don't have to move everything to Pittsburgh, they could just open a small office there and give their employees the option to move there. They've already done this, in ~2004, and the Pittsburgh office has maybe 1,000 people?
- pb7 7y ago
  > They don't have to move everything to Pittsburgh, they could just open a small office there and give their employees the option to move there. Google has had an office in Pittsburgh for over a decade now. There is physical office space for 2-3x the employees it has now and year after year, the growth there does not exceed the overall company growth. Turns out that people don’t really want to relocate to cheap cities in droves.
marcus_holmes 7y ago
> "physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable" I always remain suspicious of this, because there's so many bad managers out there who equate "working hard" with "being at your desk for a long time" and have no idea how to manage a team if they can't eyeball them. Is being physically present a genuine advantage to the organisation, or does it just make managers feel better?
VLM 7y ago
The problem with making decisions based on inaccurate facts is you can get very weird results. There's really not much in the article based on actual data; it all seems to be meme stuff that "everyone knows" but google queries seem to oppose. The main problem I've seen at companies that have "... ran out of talented devs that wanted to work in ..." stories is the labor pool is infinite IF the pay is there. As an example from the article, the median metro income in Milwaukee is $35K and in SF is $92K. And I found an infographic portraying the average software engineer pay in SF as $129K. Therefore HR needs to produce a salary for the new remote office employees and they run some simple math formulas and declare its financially irresponsible to pay a Milwaukee software developer more than 35/92*129 or $49K. The problem is, again, via googling, the average software engineer on the ground right now in Milwaukee gets $68K. Needless to say, if the locals will pay $68K and the remote coastal office will only pay $49K, the new remote office companies will never get an applicant who can even fizzbuzz much less provide value. I totally understand how the locals can produce world class software but remote offices "... ran out of talented devs ..." and decided they had to move back to SF and pay $129K again. Its a youthful thinking mistake to think overly binary; either everyone gotta decentralize or everyone gotta centralize and either extreme tend to get owned in the competitive market by folks who compromise in the middle. The main reason pay averages out more than people would think, is there is NO averaging of management demands for results. Its not like management is only going to demand 38% of the results and productivity from the new Milwaukee workers vs the SF workers regardless what they pay them.
specialist 7y ago
My hodgepodge of notions about jobs, people, geography. I have a very Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) and Jane Jacobs (Life and Death of Cities) themed view of population centers. What would it take to recreate (clone) Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, etc? Rhetorical question, everyone is already trying to do this. It comes down to clarity of purpose, investment, and riding economic trends. People getting married and starting families is mostly an economic decision. Consequently, young families will relocate as needed. Future employers and governments should be mindful and help. There are always multiple trends working simultaneously. Cities, especially coastal, will continue to become more dense. But there's also a smaller trend (demand) to return to the land. So places like Kansas should invest in restoring locally owned, smaller farms and enterprises. Modeled on how Washington State created a thriving ecosystem for wine. Apply that strategy to whatever.
Merrill 7y ago
People do move. Silicon Valley itself is a product of people moving to the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Of the eight founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, only Gordon Moore was from the Bay Area. Large, successful companies create the conditions for attracting employees to new locations. Both Seattle and Austin are examples of this. Earlier, IBM had a practice of locating in small to medium sized cities like Kingston, NY, Rochester, MN or Sunnyvale, CA. In the '50s and '60s the aerospace industry was highly mobile, with engineers moving from the North and East to the South and West.
- jefftk 7y ago
  (author) People do move. The post is arguing that (a) this is a good thing and (b) we should allow more housing construction to facilitate it (and to keep existing residents from getting forced out).
LockAndLol 7y ago
> A major factor is that current employees don't want to move. If Google announced it was moving everything to Pittsburgh, ~80% of the company would quit. People put down roots and get attached to areas, generally more so than to jobs. That's the wrong argument to make. It's not about moving somewhere, but deciding to build a new center somewhere else (in this case Pittsburgh).
- jefftk 7y ago
  Perhaps read the next paragraph? "New companies, however, don't have employees they would need to move. Why do tech startups choose the Bay when almost anywhere else would be cheaper? I see two main answers: to be close to their investors and to be able to hire from a deep talent pool."
whatsmyusername 7y ago
If you're going for VC capital you have two choices. The bay area and NYC. I live in Pittsburgh. I like Pittsburgh. But I'm also realistic. There's no VC money here. If I wanted to work on something that capital N Needed VC money I'd move. But I don't so I'm good.
sjg007 7y ago
It's kinda cool that the blog itself is aggregating FB and HN comments for the article.
iamleppert 7y ago
I hate to say it but the reason I’m in SF and not in Ohio is 100% due to the culture. There’s simply more stuff to do here, more creative people and I feel like I fit in better than Ohio (where I’m from). I’ve had the opportunity to move back but I won’t, not for any amount of money or prospect of owning a big house or early retirement.

134 points by luu 7y ago

mnm1 7y ago

> People expected telecommuting to change this, but even though we have many technical tools that make remote work far more practical than it was even ten years ago, physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable. Not for software development. I'm sure there are plenty of industries where this is true. Software just isn't one of them. In fact, I'd argue the opposite for most software companies. They suffer from poor work and poor working conditions due to locating everyone in one location.

eropple 7y ago
I'm happy to work for a company that embraces remote work, but it's undeniably more efficient and, for most people, fulfilling on a personal level to have a high-bandwidth face-to-face conversation--and "the wifi hiccuped, what did you say?", as happens here and without exception everywhere else I've been, isn't that.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hashkb 7y ago
  > undeniably more efficient No. It's debatable. Many believe remote work is undeniably more efficient and the fulfillment you feel from high bandwidth conversations is a delusion.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Regardless of how good a substitute you feel remote communication is in general, the effect of network problems and such is an objective fact, not anyone's opinion or delusion. Also, if we stipulate that my fulfillment from being in the office is irrelevant, that doesn't change the fact that other people will not conform to my preferred mode of communication. I'm fine with instant messaging, and a lot of people are, but in my experience, a majority don't or won't use it well.
    - hashkb 7y ago
      I've been working remotely for 5 years. Left the Bay Area last year. Network problems have not been an issue. Comcast goes down for a day.. I tether. Are we really saying latency and the occasional video freeze is worth forcing the whole company to commute to the office? And live within an hour or so of everyone else? The people who suck at communicating online suck in person too. At least online there's a record of who can't read or spell. And don't get me started on the hours I've had to wait while someone is in the hallway having a chat.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        The people we're talking about are people whose entire job is communication. They're people persons. What don't you understand about that? I don't get to dictate how they work. Anyway, I have other reasons for not wanting to work remotely too. I've seen many comments on HN from people that are very sure that the ideal for anyone technical is a private office that's utterly silent and undisturbed for concentration. That isn't me. I do get irritable if someone is having a long non-work conversation that's barely loud enough to be distracting, but I don't want to be shut up in a closet. People derive value from asking me stuff and vice versa.
- mnm1 7y ago
  Sure, the communication might be more fulfilling--the efficiency is debatable--for certain people but at a cost of the quality and quantity of work suffering, the commute, time wasted, money wasted on office rent, certain supplies, parking, lunch, tolls, etc.
- thatcat 7y ago
  That's just an argument for government subsidized fiber internet, repeating your self a few times a day is a minor inconvenience compared to commuting.
  - igammarays 7y ago
    Some of the best work happens not during scheduled meetings, but in spontaneous conversations with coworkers at random times during the day. Fiber internet doesn't solve that.
    - pkalinowski 7y ago
      You know, you can send a message to your coworker: "5 min call?" and BAM! One click of a button and you are talking live.
seltzered_ 7y ago
You can also have poor work and poor working conditions in a remote environment - depends on how the team and yourself operate. A phrase I often tell friends who transition into indie work or remote work is a Merlin Mann phrase "You are your own worst manager". Even if you want to argue this isn't true, developers still seem to end up in cities for the sake of networking. (bias: I've been working remotely for ~7 years and had trouble justifying a move to a smaller off-corridor city)
- mnm1 7y ago
  Sure it's not a panacea for poor work. But it does allow one much more flexibility in terms of working conditions. Having a private space is now the default. That alone is an incredible change especially for knowledge workers. Not being subjected to the noise and distractions of others is huge as is being able to set up one's own office as one wants. As far as moving to smaller cities, that's hardly related to remote work or anything but labor laws when they favor employers so heavily as they do in the US. With zero job security, of course you'll stay in or around a major metro area. That's just common sense and won't change without legislation. It's not tech specific either. But in tech, you can pretty much move to any city in the world that will allow you to work. Hardly immobile.

remote_phone 7y ago

The author made a blind guess that 80% of Google would quit If they moved HQ without any actual evidence. If Google opened up a new large office in a place like Kansas City with no salary cut and a strong internet presence and some other tech companies (ICE exchange for example), I bet enough Google employees would want to move there to make it worthwhile. Cheaper cost of living, better schools, better for families etc. plus alternatives If you get tired of working at Google but probably not since your lifestyle would be so much better than the Bay Area. I know a lot of people that are very sick of the Bay Area, especially those with kids.

malandrew 7y ago
With no salary cuts would be amazing. So long as the policy is transparent for new hires in the new market, you would only need to grandfather people those that make the move. There are tons of places I’d move to easily if I could keep my current SF salary.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Since your salary would go much further outside of SF, why would it be necessary to keep the same salary?
  - tomnipotent 7y ago
    Does Google make the same profit regardless? Yup, I think it's necessary.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      What does Google's profit have to do with your salary needs?
      - unlinked_dll 7y ago
        As Publilius Syrus put it, "everything is worth what it's purchaser will pay." Why should google be willing to pay less for continued labor after relocating if profits are unaffected? And if they're not, why would anyone keep working there?

cagenut 7y ago

The housing costs of some second/third/worse tier city are almost completely meaningless. Unless the job gave me a 10 year contract with a golden parachute or something. It doesn't matter if you can make the numbers work once, what matters is that you will almost certainly job hop 3 - 5 times, so you need to be in an area dense with employers to make that viable without having to move your life/family every time. Even if you never wind up changing jobs, the fact that you could matters, you're not completely fucked if things go south with one company. They don't own you (as much).

perl4ever 7y ago
It seems to me that you're coming from a perspective where you don't have any roots at the time of your first job. I think it might be good to step back and realize while that may describe a lot of people who go off to college some place and then take a job anywhere, surely there are millions for whom it's not true. And 5-10 years in, if you are unmarried and change your mind, you can't necessarily make it work then for a number of reasons, including that in a hot tech area, you're already old and therefore useless.
dbcurtis 7y ago
Winner, winner, chicken dinner. That goes twice if your significant other also has a similar career trajectory.
chrisfrantz 7y ago
This statement could be made in a job where remote work doesn’t exist, but thankfully it does. There’s more than enough work out there.
- jayd16 7y ago
  Then why is the article talking about where the jobs should be? If this was actually a reality then this post wouldn't exist.
jayd16 7y ago
Exactly. Who wants to live in a company town? I don't.

hashkb 7y ago

> even though we have many technical tools that make remote work far more practical than it was even ten years ago, physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable. I've seen this artificially enforced by executives who refuse to engage in a discussion about remote work. There are a lot of them, and until they feel comfortable managing remotely, remote workers can't flourish. So it's nothing to do with the nature or quality of remote work. We just don't have enough truly remote friendly execs.

tehjoker 7y ago

Just... eliminate the private housing market. Unlike companies that produce things, there's zero value add by landlords and banks. Rents and mortgages far exceed the value of construction and allow the richest people to snap them up. Make it more fair, and cheaper by eliminating landlords and private sales of land. The land was all stolen anyway.

war1025 7y ago
Value is absolutely added by both, and suggesting otherwise is pretty naive. Landlords take on the responsibility for long-term ownership and maintenance of a property and give people access to it on a shorter term basis that is much easier to get out of. Banks give access to money that you don't currently have with understanding that you will pay them back a premium over time for that service. If you "eliminated landlords and private sale of land", you would pretty quickly end up with a system consisting of landlords and private sale of land, maybe under a new names.
- logicchains 7y ago
  In mainland China, before the communist revolution landlords used to be called "dizhu" (literally "land lord"). The name took on bad connotations (the communist revolutionaries didn't take kindly to landlords), and nowadays they're called "fangdong" instead. Apart from the fact that the land is technically on a 99 year lease from the government not owned, a "fangdong" is still pretty much the same as a landlord anywhere else.
- sgift 7y ago
  > Banks give access to money that you don't currently have with understanding that you will pay them back a premium over time for that service. By using money that they don't have either. I think that part is important to remember. The difference between a bank and a private person is not that the bank has money to lend. It's that they are allowed to lend money they don't have. If you do that it's called fraud.
  - aguyfromnb 7y ago

mike50 7y ago

This only applies to garbage tier cites that should either be bulldozed or if near a city that people want to live in just be annexed.

m0zg 7y ago

For most of us here, there's no reason to move anywhere at all. Programmers can work from anywhere in the world. We need to let go of the idea that "work" means 2 hours of commute and sitting in an open plan under constant barrage of interruptions for 40 hours a week. We need to let go of _all_ the components of this definition, from "40 hours" to "office" to "commute". There are jobs which have to be done in the office only. Programming is not one of those jobs.

titanomachy 7y ago
Maybe it's because I'm relatively young, but I actually like working in an office. I bike 15 minutes to work rather than commuting 2 hours, because my work pays me enough to live close by. I spend some of my time collaborating closely with smart people who are a lot more experienced than me, which seems to be the fastest way to learn. I spend then rest of the time with headphones on facing the corner of the open office, hopefully getting absorbed in my work to the point where I'm not too distracted by the people around me. I eat free food that's better than anything I could make at home. I've had periods of working from home in my life and they've been lonely and unproductive in comparison. My only point is that there _are_ some people who genuinely prefer working at an office.
- m0zg 7y ago
  And those people can come to the office. But it should really not be a requirement, and work should be structured in such a way as to not penalize people who are remote: around written communication, with infrequent teleconferencing.
  - stkdump 7y ago
    I think the problem is that as soon as everyone who has the opportunity to leave the office does so, the training effect for new developers is gone. It might be better for you and your personal performance, but is it better for the company overall? That might not be so clear cut, and one of the reasons why especially big tech is so hesitant -- as opposed to companies that rely on the perk of remote work to be able to attract talent or pay less.

systematical 7y ago

The article mentions DC and I'd just like vent about how miserable a place this is to live in. I see some people spend 10 hours a week and often more just commuting to work. It's overpriced. And when you look at the state of IT in the federal government you realize why this government fails so badly at non-tech things. I'll be running away from the major cities as fast as possible as soon as possible. Yuck. You actually lose money working in DC, the salaries aren't even worth.

cowsandmilk 7y ago
> You actually lose money working in DC, the salaries aren't even worth. People around DC have such low salaries that they are among the richest counties in the country... https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/census-bureau-5-richest-counties-are-dc-suburbs https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/censu...
- humanrebar 7y ago
  That just proves that there's a certain class of rich people (diplomats? lawyers?) that have plenty of work in the D.C. area and they've carved some neighborhoods out for themselves. It doesn't prove anything about what life for a DBA in D.C. would be like.
  - cowsandmilk 7y ago
    Glassdoor shows the pay for DBAs in the DC area are above the national average. For software developers, the median salaries are below those in SF and Seattle, but if you are a FAANG level engineer, Amazon’s pay scale in NOVA is identical to Seattle and Facebook pays similarly. > carved some neighborhoods out for themselves This is an effort to imply that the suburbs of DC with high median salaries are small enclaves. This could not be further from the truth. Fairfax County, which has the third highest median household income in the US, is over a million in population and the largest county in VA. Montgomery County is the largest county in Maryland, also over a million people. So these counties are not separated from the rest of the metro area, but instead have over 2 million people in an MSA of 6 million.

neilwilson 7y ago

This argument has been made for decades. Isn't it about time we realised that people live somewhere amongst social capital they have built up throughout their lives. And therefore business capital should move where the people are - to avoid damaging that social capital. Not the other way around. Ultimately people work to live. Those who live to work are a tiny minority. With modern technology there is little excuse. Fewer and fewer enterprises require physical concentration to operate.

ljf 7y ago
This - and to add to that, the high value of this social capital when you have lower financal capital. Someone to help with the kids, relax with, help you fix your car, have a cheap evening or weekend of hanging out with. When you move it can take years to build all that up again. You might be able to do without it all, but you either have to pay to replace it or go without.
- icebraining 7y ago
  But that implies we should centralize in cities, so people don't have to move if they lose their jobs. Getting a few companies to a small town just means that when one fails, workers are more likely to have to move at a later stage in life, when they already have kids and a mortgage and such. Better for them to move to a hub when they're young. Plus their children will already be born in a hub, so they won't have to move at all.
  - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
    I agree with what you said but how many people can afford to have families in hubs like you assume?
    - jefftk 7y ago
      (author) The main reason it's expensive is because supply restrictions have pushed housing far above the cost of construction. We could fix this by allowing more construction, which is what I'm arguing for in the post.

atemerev 7y ago

I wonder why 100% remote positions and companies are still marginal. Software engineering is one of the few industries where remote work is possible, and yet hardly available, despite obvious advantages.

rocqua 7y ago
In my experience, remote work remains less effective than being physically present. Especially if you are never present. It just makes coordination and socialization so much more difficult.
ozim 7y ago
Because remote is hard, if it would be just about typing code then yes you could live in igloo in Greenland. You need people who are able to work remotely together. It is not only about having really smart devs who can grasp how to do Y with tech Z. It is also about having really smart managers and really smart company owners. Building such a team takes years, it is not like you can hire 10 devs, a manager and dump loads of cash on them to build a product. First you have to get all those different people to trust each other. Then there are differences in ideas how things should be done, it is hard to solve some of those when people are in the same room. People have different temperaments, they have different ambitions. We have all the technology to communicate but people have problems with stating their ideas in clear way in writing. Calling might help a bit, but to build trust you have to work with someone face to face and go trough rough times together.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's worth trying. For an industry so ostensibly focused on innovation and experimentation, much of tech remains as conservative as any other in terms of trying out new ways of work. Though certainly there are some bright spots opening up to remote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21764110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21764110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19444960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19444960
  - 7y ago

jillesvangurp 7y ago

People move to where the economic activity is. Typically the best and most in demand skills go first because they get payed extra. This re-enforces the importance of these areas. That's how big cities emerged. They are concentrations of people with skills and supporting infrastructure. Despite the cost of living (which is insane), San Francisco is still attractive to software companies because of the insane numbers of people with software skills in the area. IMHO there are a few things that are accelerating this: 1) dropping cost of of transport (clean energy, autonomous driving/flying, etc.) this will allow people to move more efficiently and more often and with less guilt about environmental concerns. 2) improving tooling for remote work. 3) co-working spaces and other flexible work infrastructure. 4) the gig economy, work, living, eating, transport, it's basically all people outsourcing things to each other.

6c696e7578 7y ago

I've never understood why with IT jobs in the UK that they're all centred around London. Especially when they then offshore bits of the company to India or Eastern/Southern Europe requiring contracted staff to use a VPN. It seems companies want staff onsite in London, purely for the enjoyment of making people commute there. This does no good for the environment other than help to conversion of fossil fuel into co². If people are to be managed in things like "sprints" or other ticket monitoring/work managing systems then there's no reason why people can't work from home so long as they're happy to communicate on normal daily/weekly management calls. Bring on telecommuting, it works for and helps everyone.

laputan_machine 7y ago
There's a push to make less expensive northern cities (Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool) appealing for tech. London still has (and will do for the foreseeable future) the lion's share, but there plenty of good tech jobs up north.
- ck425 7y ago
  Same with the Scottish central belt. There are plenty of good jobs up here. Part of the reason for the London centricness is that relatively few people realise just how many good jobs there are outside of London.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    All the jobs are a few clicks away from being found. London probably offers quite a few amenities that people want, even though they hate many aspects of it. One of the crucial amenities a big city provides is security that if you lose an income stream, you will be able to get another easily. How much are people willing to pay for that?
    - ck425 7y ago
      If you're a software engineer that security exists in every major city. Plus the cost of living to salary ratio is so much better that it's far easier to save an emergency fund.

arendtio 7y ago

To me, it sounds as simple as everybody does what he thinks is best for him: 1. Companies are founded in the big cities, to have access to talent 2. People move to big cities to have access to better jobs As long as the benefits outweigh the cost, the chances are small that anything changes...

jefftk 7y ago
Where this simple model fails is that existing residents oppose the construction of additional housing. Housing prices rise, fewer people can afford to move there, and renters with lower paying jobs get forced out.

generalpass 7y ago

I wonder how the numbers will shake out for the McKesson Corporation move from San Francisco to Irving, Texas.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

cowsandmilk 7y ago

People always talk about HQ2 being in Dc (and formerly NYC) but they simultaneously announced 5,000 jobs in Nashville. [0] https://www.newschannel5.com/news/amazon-in-nashville-what-is-an-operations-center-of-excellence https://www.newschannel5.com/news/amazon-in-nashville-what-i...

esotericn 7y ago

The whole idea of remote working to arbitrage cost of living falls apart if you are in any way social. I think that a lot of people banging on about remote work just haven't tried it for an extended period. It works for some, and for those - great. To me, it's just another step down the 'technification' of everything in which people don't speak to the people around them (because they've been 'removed' from their lives) but spend all of their time in front of screens. I don't want to live in the middle of nowhere and earn 10x what the average local does. I want the people around me to be roughly on my level and share my interests. That's something that's easy to do in a city. That's how businesses end up centering in hubs anyway. Who wants to be a startup founder living in the country alone? I'm sure this person exists, but they're the exception not the rule. I mean, right now, you can look at a place like London and see hyperlocal clustering of wealth, one street will be the 'nice street' and the next one rough. People really care about this. If you earned a London salary in my hometown you'd be ostracising yourself completely from those around you by virtue of just having none of the same concerns. Yeah, you own the home outright, you can buy a brand new car every 6 months, the price tags in the supermarket may as well be blank, etc. Oh yeah, and you have working hours whenever you want, booking a holiday is telling your boss "I won't be in Friday, guv". Wait until your neighbour tells you again how they're struggling to pay the bills or they've just been sanctioned by the benefits office. I don't see how that benefits anyone.

gurkendoktor 7y ago
> The whole idea of remote working to arbitrage cost of living falls apart if you are in any way social. Unless you grew up in the area from which you work remotely, in which case you can be more social because connecting with old friends and family is much easier than making new friends at 30+. > If I earned a London salary in my hometown I'd be ostracising myself completely from those around me [...] I don't see how that benefits anyone. I don't see the problem with having more money than most of your neighbors - instead of buying new cars, you could spend it on your neighborhood and lift it up. Seems healthier than what is happening instead - non-techies being forced out of their homes because they can't keep up with techie rents.
- 7y ago

solatic 7y ago

This is a classic example of a situation where the interests of individuals and companies are not aligned with the wider national interest. Yes, it makes tremendous economic sense for people and companies to co-locate in cities. In a country where individuals have a choice to live in an urban or a rural environment, and their demonstrated preference is to live in an urban environment, then urbanization becomes a self-reinforcing positive economic spiral. However, this spiral is offset by a negative economic spiral in rural areas. As the national currency appreciates due to the increasing competitiveness of urban centers, rural industry becomes less and less competitive. When a national economy is in a downturn, the central bank can devalue the national currency to improve the price-competitiveness of national products for export; however, rural economies don't have this option as they share a currency with urban centers. So rural communities continue their downward economic spiral. Why is this a problem? If we could force the rural laggards to move to urban centers, or if rural populations didn't hold outsize influence over the political process, it wouldn't be. But we can neither coerce rural depopulation nor can we make that kind of political change. So the situation continues. Unfortunately, there will be a price to pay. Increasing political polarization leads to civil conflict. The EU narrowly avoided collapse by bailing out the Greeks - the US Congress has been practicing "bailouts" for a century (at least) with pork-barrel legislation. So let people move to jobs - as long as they're cognizant that their taxes will continue to go back where they came from.

codekansas 7y ago

There's at least one large tech company that has located themselves totally outside the typical tech hubs - Epic Systems, in Madison. I interviewed for them after graduation but ended up taking a job at Facebook in Seattle. The offer was for half my current salary. They tried to argue that with the cost of living adjustment I could buy a house, but what 22-year-old wants to buy a house? Locating in Madison is kind of a physical manifestation of their business strategy - avoid any competition, pay sub-market rates and issue strict, possibly non-enforceable non-compete clauses. It works for people who really want to live in the Midwest. I think there's a spectrum between "live to work" and "work to live", and I think most ambitious college grads actually want many opportunities, for a while at least.

lipstone 7y ago
Quite frankly, I think Epic Systems realizes it can't compete with Facebook. But the value is much better in comparison to many non-FAANG Bay Area companies. I was actually in a similar situation, where Capital One offered 90K for Richmond, VA and it seemed better than ~120k offer in the Bay Area. But then I got a Google offer and stopped considering both of the others. The high-CoL companies really only make sense financially if you're in the upper tiers of pay (and/or on the path to reaching that level of pay).
opportune 7y ago
It’s also part of their strategy to churn through 22-25 year olds by overworking them in their first jobs out of college when they likely don’t have as many family obligations or well calibrated expectations for what work-life balance entails. And it saves them money since they don’t have to promote that many people to senior positions. There are plenty of other companies outside big tech hubs, you just don’t hear about them as much and they don’t recruit the same way a lot of other tech companies do. For example, Epic’s competitor Cerner is in Kansas City which many people on this post are using as an example of a cheap place with a small tech scene, despite Cerner employing over 10K

foxhop 7y ago

I work remotely for the past 6 years and will likely never have an office job again. I live in my home town and have worked for start ups in Santa Monica, San Francisco, Boston, and New York. I live in Eastern Connecticut, which is the side on the state that people often do not know about. It's a 2.5 hour drive to New York or Boston. It's not as affluent as the weat side, close to New York. I do a lot of gardening when the weather permits. https://russell.ballestrini.net/how-to-work-from-home-the-road-to-remote-chapter-1/ https://russell.ballestrini.net/how-to-work-from-home-the-ro...

mwcampbell 7y ago

I believe we in the software industry have a moral duty to pursue remote, distributed work, as much as possible, for a few reasons: The software that runs the world should be developed by people living all over the world, not just people who can move to a few cities. To me, this is part of real diversity. We talk about gathering requirements for software. Well, it's easier to do it when the people developing the software are as diverse as possible. Limiting these jobs to people who are willing and able to move to one of the tech hubs is bound to limit some kinds of diversity. People should be free to live in and support their local communities. I think a lot of the political polarization that has been building up lately, particularly in the US, is between the "elites" in big cities and the "regular people" in the rest of the country. We should try to reduce that gap. Of course, people who find their local community intolerable should be free to move elsewhere. Remote work, especially when it's primarily text-based, is also more equitable for people with disabilities. Blind people benefit somewhat from the fact that nobody is relying on facial expressions or body language (assuming video calls aren't a routine thing). For people with other kinds of disabilities, the benefits can be far greater. What would you do if a deaf person or a person with a severe speech impediment applied for a job on your on-site team? Well, if you're primarily using text, it's not as big an issue. Sure, we can always accommodate specific people with specific disabilities, but it's better if the normal way of doing things already works for them. Disclosure: I currently work at Microsoft, on the main Redmond campus. So call me a hypocrite if you like. But I honestly think I'm doing a lot of good where I'm at, since I work on the Windows accessibility team. I do sometimes bring up the subject of remote work with my colleagues. And whenever I move on, I will probably insist that my next job be remote.

cryptica 7y ago

>> If Google announced it was moving everything to Pittsburgh, ~80% of the company would quit. They don't have to move everything to Pittsburgh, they could just open a small office there and give their employees the option to move there. >> People expected telecommuting to change this, but even though we have many technical tools that make remote work far more practical than it was even ten years ago, physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable. I think office politics are to blame for this. Remote people are often more productive than those who are on-site but they are less likely to be promoted in a mixed envrionment. That's why it's often better if everyone is remote; then everyone has equal opportunity. >> Good ideas flow more freely between organizations So do bad ideas. Bad ideas backed by a lot of money spread like the plague. >> Coordination between organizations is easier So that they can make cartels which erode workers' rights and monopolize industries. >> Switching jobs is easier, so people don't get as stuck in jobs they don't like They can be forced to live in a horrible place that they hate, but at least they can distract themselves from their misery by changing companies all the time to give themselves the illusion of hope. >> Ease of switching also allows people to take larger career risks To the point that everyone in your workplace is focused on risky career politics instead of producing actual value.

jefftk 7y ago
> They don't have to move everything to Pittsburgh, they could just open a small office there and give their employees the option to move there. They've already done this, in ~2004, and the Pittsburgh office has maybe 1,000 people?
pb7 7y ago
> They don't have to move everything to Pittsburgh, they could just open a small office there and give their employees the option to move there. Google has had an office in Pittsburgh for over a decade now. There is physical office space for 2-3x the employees it has now and year after year, the growth there does not exceed the overall company growth. Turns out that people don’t really want to relocate to cheap cities in droves.

marcus_holmes 7y ago

> "physically being in the same place as your coworkers remains extremely valuable" I always remain suspicious of this, because there's so many bad managers out there who equate "working hard" with "being at your desk for a long time" and have no idea how to manage a team if they can't eyeball them. Is being physically present a genuine advantage to the organisation, or does it just make managers feel better?

VLM 7y ago

The problem with making decisions based on inaccurate facts is you can get very weird results. There's really not much in the article based on actual data; it all seems to be meme stuff that "everyone knows" but google queries seem to oppose. The main problem I've seen at companies that have "... ran out of talented devs that wanted to work in ..." stories is the labor pool is infinite IF the pay is there. As an example from the article, the median metro income in Milwaukee is $35K and in SF is $92K. And I found an infographic portraying the average software engineer pay in SF as $129K. Therefore HR needs to produce a salary for the new remote office employees and they run some simple math formulas and declare its financially irresponsible to pay a Milwaukee software developer more than 35/92*129 or $49K. The problem is, again, via googling, the average software engineer on the ground right now in Milwaukee gets $68K. Needless to say, if the locals will pay $68K and the remote coastal office will only pay $49K, the new remote office companies will never get an applicant who can even fizzbuzz much less provide value. I totally understand how the locals can produce world class software but remote offices "... ran out of talented devs ..." and decided they had to move back to SF and pay $129K again. Its a youthful thinking mistake to think overly binary; either everyone gotta decentralize or everyone gotta centralize and either extreme tend to get owned in the competitive market by folks who compromise in the middle. The main reason pay averages out more than people would think, is there is NO averaging of management demands for results. Its not like management is only going to demand 38% of the results and productivity from the new Milwaukee workers vs the SF workers regardless what they pay them.

specialist 7y ago

My hodgepodge of notions about jobs, people, geography. I have a very Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) and Jane Jacobs (Life and Death of Cities) themed view of population centers. What would it take to recreate (clone) Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, etc? Rhetorical question, everyone is already trying to do this. It comes down to clarity of purpose, investment, and riding economic trends. People getting married and starting families is mostly an economic decision. Consequently, young families will relocate as needed. Future employers and governments should be mindful and help. There are always multiple trends working simultaneously. Cities, especially coastal, will continue to become more dense. But there's also a smaller trend (demand) to return to the land. So places like Kansas should invest in restoring locally owned, smaller farms and enterprises. Modeled on how Washington State created a thriving ecosystem for wine. Apply that strategy to whatever.

Merrill 7y ago

People do move. Silicon Valley itself is a product of people moving to the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Of the eight founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, only Gordon Moore was from the Bay Area. Large, successful companies create the conditions for attracting employees to new locations. Both Seattle and Austin are examples of this. Earlier, IBM had a practice of locating in small to medium sized cities like Kingston, NY, Rochester, MN or Sunnyvale, CA. In the '50s and '60s the aerospace industry was highly mobile, with engineers moving from the North and East to the South and West.

jefftk 7y ago
(author) People do move. The post is arguing that (a) this is a good thing and (b) we should allow more housing construction to facilitate it (and to keep existing residents from getting forced out).

LockAndLol 7y ago

> A major factor is that current employees don't want to move. If Google announced it was moving everything to Pittsburgh, ~80% of the company would quit. People put down roots and get attached to areas, generally more so than to jobs. That's the wrong argument to make. It's not about moving somewhere, but deciding to build a new center somewhere else (in this case Pittsburgh).

jefftk 7y ago
Perhaps read the next paragraph? "New companies, however, don't have employees they would need to move. Why do tech startups choose the Bay when almost anywhere else would be cheaper? I see two main answers: to be close to their investors and to be able to hire from a deep talent pool."

whatsmyusername 7y ago

If you're going for VC capital you have two choices. The bay area and NYC. I live in Pittsburgh. I like Pittsburgh. But I'm also realistic. There's no VC money here. If I wanted to work on something that capital N Needed VC money I'd move. But I don't so I'm good.

sjg007 7y ago

It's kinda cool that the blog itself is aggregating FB and HN comments for the article.

iamleppert 7y ago

I hate to say it but the reason I’m in SF and not in Ohio is 100% due to the culture. There’s simply more stuff to do here, more creative people and I feel like I fit in better than Ohio (where I’m from). I’ve had the opportunity to move back but I won’t, not for any amount of money or prospect of owning a big house or early retirement.