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As someone who has actually managed to work remotely in a small city while employed by a major tech firm at normal pay rates, I can definitely say your scenario
by topkai22 7y ago
As someone who has actually managed to work remotely in a small city while employed by a major tech firm at normal pay rates, I can definitely say your scenario does not match my lived experience.
1) unless you move to a very small town, there are still plenty of people in your economic demographic. In the US, roughly 5% of households earn more than $200k. In a town of 70k, you’d expect there to be roughly 27k households and therefore 1300 households earning more than $200k. If you are currently making more then $500k you might be a little more out there, but then you really have no reason to move, do you? (Your techie peers at other companies don’t make that sort of money).
2) “Friends from work” don’t go away when working remotely. We still have “water cooler” conversations and members of my team have occasionally visited each other’s cities outside of work. We also do a ton of socializing when we are physically together for work.
That being said, it does reduce that aspect of social life. What fills it? Other activities- family/children, hobbies, causes, clubs, etc. I’ve lived in major tech hubs before- it did take longer to establish a social network while working remotely in my smaller city, but once established it has been much more fulfilling.
3) I apologize for criticizing, but your concern about not being able to socialize with the middle class sounds bizarre. Some of our dearest friends in this city are solidly middle class- 911 dispatchers, teachers, carpenters, nurses, and sales people. We met through sports, children’s school, and volunteering. We specifically chose to live well below our means (FIREing before the term existed I guess) so our neighbors are a varied lot, and we like them. We can’t invite them to join us vacationing in Europe, but other than that it’s there is little awkwardness.
- asaph 7y ago> In the US, roughly 5% of households earn more than $200k. In a town of 70k, you’d expect there to be roughly 27k households and therefore 1300 households earning more than $200k. This assumes uniform distribution of household incomes across cities of different sizes, which I suspect is a shaky assumption. More likely, the high earning households are concentrated in a short list of major population centers.
- topkai22 7y agoNot as much as you think. I couldn't quickly find the dataset where I looked at this before, but https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Household-Income https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Household-Income has percentages of population earning more than $200k by state and MSA. The Birmingham Alabama metro area has 4.03% of its households earning more than $200k, and Alabama a whole has 2.92% of household earning more than $200k (the 5th lowest in the Union, btw). That means Alabama outside its biggest, richest city is still 2.5% over $200k. Sure, those are also probably concentrated in the other 2nd cities in the state like Montgomery and Tuscaloosa, but you are getting really far down the list of US Metro areas by population when you get to Tuscaloosa Alabama. There are well off people throughout the United State, not only in the top 20 metros.
- TheCoelacanth 7y agoEven small towns have a decent number of high earning people, mainly small business owners.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- esotericn 7y ago> not being able to socialize with the middle class sounds bizarre. These are your words, not mine! If you're working remotely as a software developer then you're pretty much middle class by definition.
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoI think software devs, even remote probably make at least 100k, but I'm just guessing. That's a lot more than median us income of $46k (1) in 2019. Still not that far above dual income families. However they aren't paying as high a wages in rural areas as others pointed out so rural avg probably lower than big city avg. 1. https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/average-income-in-us-14852178 https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/average-income-in...