21 ms·

Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

258 points by kjhughes 6y ago

option 6y ago
If a company want to hire remote workers, why do that in US or Europe?
- ruffrey 6y ago
  Time zones are closer, cultural fit, communication style fit, easier travel and onsite when necessary, more familiar tax schemes.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  My company hires a lot of Croatian software engineers. Most of them speak great English. 1/3 are very, very good, 1/3 OK, 1/3 literally terrible. But we rotate the bad ones out and keep the good ones, and the rumor is they cost about 1/3 or 1/2 of an American worker. I honestly feel that the American software engineer may be in trouble if remote really does take off -- 2 solid Croatian guys for the price of 1 tech bro is a very good deal.
  - asdff 6y ago
    I expect to see a lot of companies doing this. You read the same exact docs whether you live in SF or Bulgaria. If anything you have better math skills outside the U.S. which helps you more than a language barrier would matter. Some might argue the best engineering is here, maybe that's correct maybe not, but companies rarely want the best. They just want the cheapest possible tool for the job they think they have. If a remote dev is significantly cheaper than a U.S. based remote dev, no business will be paying that premium.
    - thehappypm 6y ago
      It's worth mentioning that none of our tech leads are outsourced. All of the very demanding architecture work and decision making happens here. A lot of that yields a spec that needs a hundred hours of dev time -- for example, "update the iOS and Android apps to match the redesign we did on Mobile Web". You don't need a US based engineer for that type of work, but you sure as hell want the best possible guy designing the architecture and doing code review.
maxdo 6y ago
How about competition, the biggest reason they got 200k+ a year was their location. Now they will start competing with the non SV market.
rconti 6y ago
Anecdotally, it surprises me how many people are still buying homes during the pandemic. Region-wide, prices fell 2.9% in the Bay Area in 2019; it "feels like" prices merely held relatively steady, and the selling prices I'm seeing the past month or so are on track with that.
schnevets 6y ago
I know this article focused on established players, but I'm curious what the pandemic means for early-phase startups based out of SV and NYC. When every sales pitch and networking event is a Zoom call, you lose any benefit to taking expensive space in a Mission District incubator. If aspiring founders leave the city (even temporarily), they may still find success, but are they going to relocate back to the pricey areas when it's safe to open up? I've spent the last 5 years hoping for a catalyst that moves tech out of the two biggest players so it can actually help stimulate different regions of the US. Maybe the quarantine will finally trigger this
- gregwebs 6y ago
  I think a big factor to Silicon Valley is VCs wanting in person meetings with founders and to have in person board meetings. If VCs realize they can take pitches and do board meetings over Zoom they can start investing outside Silicon Valley and startups don't have to start and then stay here.
bradlys 6y ago
Meh - people are going to be experiencing a wake up call in a couple years when they lose that job and need another. I really doubt remote based jobs will go up in income now. I expect them to fall - if anything. (Increased supply of workers wanting to go remote cause housing too expensive in big cities - can you imagine how many people are craving a bigger home now?) Can't imagine how devastating it will be when you see your household income fall from $500k+/yr to $200k/yr. Junior ain't going to private schools anymore.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
I left a decade ago. And my standard of living went way up.
- ruffrey 6y ago
  Where'd you go, if you don't mind me asking...?
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Midwest, college town, house in the country on 80 acres. My kids grew up, they could walk around outside all day and still be at home. They could invite friends to visit, do projects, shoot, saw, drive carts, dig holes. All three are Eagle Scouts, Engineers, black belts. Wife and I have 7 gardens plus landscaping projects. Two sheds 20X50, tractors and implements. Orchard. All for less than that old house in San Jose.
    - 535188B17C93743 6y ago
      Good to hear you're happy
    - ruffrey 6y ago
      Incredible. I wonder, how different were sub-cultural an social aspects, versus the Bay?
esotericn 6y ago
The pairing of working in an office with a hellish commute is a bit odd. Maybe SF really is a parallel universe. Here in the UK, basically anyone earning a tech salary can afford to live within 10-20 mins cycle of work, even if they want children. You won't have a home with a garden and all the rest of the knick knacks, sure, but that's a different discussion.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Most techies in SF could afford to live relatively close to work, or without roommates, or both. The reason why they don't is still due to the high rent though. When living with a roommate or two, or living a bit further away means you get an extra $1000+ a month to spend on other things, that can be very enticing.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    This suggests that it's not only just that rents are high, but also that the current housing stock is not configured for the type of demand (small homes for few people, instead of large homes for lots of people).
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Yeah, I tend to agree. A lot of young people happily live in group houses; I suspect a lot more would if it didn't mean compromising on floor space or bathroom availability.
  - phendrenad2 6y ago
    This isn't true, at least of all the tech workers I've worked with. None of them could afford to live within a 30min commute of a downtown SF startup.
    - TulliusCicero 6y ago
      That sounds rather implausible, given the average dev salary in SF and the existence of BART. For example, living in Daly City would give you a ~30min commute, and the average rent there is $2,500, so $30,000 of post-tax income annually. High, obviously, but certainly doable on most SF dev salaries; Hired says the average there is 145k gross, so perhaps 100k or so after tax: https://hired.com/page/state-of-salaries https://hired.com/page/state-of-salaries
rootedbox 6y ago
"In 2013, Yahoo Inc. decided its lax policies on working from home had prevented it from innovating and required everyone to come back to the office." -- and now in 2020 Yahoo is an innovative power house...
- shuckles 6y ago
  Just have to be more innovative than the counterfactual, which was probably the case.
starpilot 6y ago
People are going to be moving Mountain House or Reno at farthest, not Cleveland. Though the thought of buying a literal mansion near Boise with your techbux is amusing.
- jameslevy 6y ago
  Mountain House near Tracy? I don't think I've ever heard of Mountain House before.
  - starpilot 6y ago
    Don't get me wrong, it's kind of a weird planned community in the desert. I only know it because my coworker moved there and had a 1-2 hour commute into San Jose.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Idaho has been receiving a huge influx of Californians. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-10/go-back-to-california-wave-of-newcomers-fuels-backlash-in-boise https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-10/go-back-... https://www.idahostatesman.com/opinion/editorials/article237245439.html https://www.idahostatesman.com/opinion/editorials/article237... https://www.businessinsider.com/why-millennials-are-moving-from-california-to-boise-idaho-2019-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-millennials-are-moving-f...
  - starpilot 6y ago
    Yep. I think the overall migration as been: Bay Area -> Seattle -> Boise -> Nevada?
__sy__ 6y ago
"[Living in] a one-bedroom rental in South San Francisco, a short commute from Facebook Inc.’s offices in Menlo Park" -- might want to edit the "short" part. I think that's at least a 1-hour commute, EACH way :)
saagarjha 6y ago
One interesting side effect is that local schools are already seeing declining enrollment as families can't afford to live here. I have hear rumors that my local school district, CUSD, may have to close a school and reduce staff because they don't have enough students.
epistasis 6y ago
An evergreen headline... In the 90s I remember hearing this too. Use the high salary and property value increases to build a nestegg, but keep an eye out for other geographic opportunities because the locals are determined to keep you out, as a class, even if they are friendly one to one. These days, the property value scam has been going so long that new high wage workers are often locked out for many years, to the benefit of all prior arrivals. But same story otherwise.
- malandrew 6y ago
  Well to some degree it actually happened. All the activity in the first dot com book was in the Valley. Afterwards a lot of it migrated up to San Francisco. Now that both places are saturated. It's starting to happen in the East Bay. After San Francisco and the East Bay have started saturating, other places were put on the map like Seattle, NYC, Austin and Pittsburgh.
- lanewinfield 6y ago
  One minor difference in the story: a global pandemic
  - arbuge 6y ago
    How do you think that will change things this time around exactly?
    - rsanek 6y ago
      I think it's already forced many employers that perviously weren't as remote-friendly to move more aggressively towards it. Already we've seen that in a big way at Twitter (see post from 2 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647)
    - lanewinfield 6y ago
      It's simple. There needed to be an outside force to push large scale testing of remote to convince people to try it. That's the pandemic. It wasn't going to happen on large scale without it. Now that it's been proven in many fields to be viable, it's got a much higher likelihood of sticking than before.
dfgtrhrer 6y ago
And I'm considering to become a billionaire this year. So what?
raldi 6y ago
“I think it's fair to say that Silicon Valley is dead.” —Altavista founder, 1993 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.folklore.computers/bvE0Ka5nCnM/NAIOQnrEyCAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.folklore.comp... (Note: Google Groups links don’t work on mobile unless you Request Desktop Site in Chrome)
- rajnathani 6y ago
  Interesting, however he did have a point about prop 13.
cactus2093 6y ago
I'm certainly daydreaming about this, as someone living in SF right now. But IMO things are still too uncertain to pull the trigger on making a huge move. And I wonder if the likeliest scenario, is that everyone strongly considers doing this, but then we all slowly get used to the "new normal" and by the time it's clear one way or the other what the future is starting to look like, we're past the peak of the virus (maybe it's early 2021 and there's a vaccine starting to roll out) and everyone just kind of settles back into mostly the same life they previously had due to inertia. And anecdotally I've heard very few people say they now want to stay fully remote forever. What I've heard instead is people talking about how they hope that 2-3 days a week in the office might become the new normal. That might open up your options a bit, maybe that makes you willing to commute 1 - 1.5hrs instead of 30 min - 1 hr. But that wouldn't allow anyone to leave the metro area. In fact, maybe this scenario actually increases cost of living because now you need to both be close enough to downtown to commute a few days a week, and have enough space for a dedicated home office so you can work from home productively the other few days a week.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  > In fact, maybe this scenario actually increases cost of living because now you need to both be close enough to downtown to commute a few days a week, and have enough space for a dedicated home office so you can work from home productively the other few days a week. I agree completely. Like, I decided to live in a small apartment downtown Vancouver because the office is really close. To be comfortable working from home, I need a bigger place with an extra room. Either I go back to the office, or I move away from downtown and don't go back to the office.
- ghaff 6y ago
  The Bay Area arguably doesn't lend itself as well to a part-time WFH situation as other cities do. Given that it's not just the core city that's expensive but the whole peninsula where most of the jobs are located and even most of the surrounding areas. You can get out of it with a long enough occasional commute--though then you're probably also too far out to regularly take advantage of urban culture, etc. By contrast, somewhere like Boston assuming the jobs are even in the city (many aren't), a drive that's 60-90 minutes depending on time of day puts you into pretty reasonably priced exurbs.
aripickar 6y ago
I'm pretty bearish on the pandemic actually leading to massive change in the number of people permanently working from home. My boss put out a survey a week or two ago among my org (30 or so people), and 70% said that they want to work from the office, full time, 20% said some time or most of the time, and 10% said fully remote. And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home during the pandemic (young, no kids, etc). I just don't think that this will change much. There is just too much detrimental effect one one's career from not being seen at the office. For a company that's not fully remote (i.e. gitlab), people who are fully remote are going to fall behind in promotions, etc. There's just not enough benefit for people who don't hate the bay area.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  I've seen/heard different numbers from elsewhere: 20% want to work from home permanently 20% want to get back to the office full time 60% want flexibility somewhere in between Personally, I think the specific breakdown is less important than companies realizing that letting people be remote can improve work/life balance, reduces office space needs, and they have most of the infrastructure to support it. As an industry, we still need to figure out mentorship and career development for remote/partially-remote teams, but I'm optimistic on that front.
  - take_a_breath 6y ago
    ==reduces office space needs== While increasing their employees home-space needs. People will need bigger houses and apartments if everyone is going to work from home long-term.
    - neutronicus 6y ago
      Which they will find, for the same price, out in the sticks when they don't need to drive in.
      - take_a_breath 6y ago
lalaland1125 6y ago
This could finally help solve the housing crisis in many of America's large cities. Every employee who moves out frees up one apartment for everyone else. 30,000 employees leaving is equivalent to building 30,000 apartments.
- mjg59 6y ago
  The number of tech workers in the bay who have zero roommates is a lot smaller than you seem to think.
  - EVdotIO 6y ago
    Yeah, one of the reasons I left. A 30 year old with a 100k job needing roommates is absurd.
mikeryan 6y ago
When I read these I feel its way to early to start making determinations on whether "Working for Home" is here to stay. It's going to work for some and not for others, but a few exceptional months with no clear forecasts on what happens next makes long term decisions terribly difficult. I'll be fascinated to see how this workout for Google and Microsoft coming into Q1 of 2021 compared to how things worked out for Yahoo! when they banned working from home a few years ago. I may be more of a bear on this than most on here but I don't think working from home is going to be quite as successful as many think.
valar_m 6y ago
Christy Lake, chief people officer at Twilio: > “It’s probably not great business practice to pay Bay Area comps in Michigan,” Lake says. And when it comes time to promote, would those employees have the same opportunity to advance as everybody else? “We need to think proactively,” she says. So, in case anyone is applying to Twilio, heads up, I guess.
- foobarian 6y ago
  The market will take care of itself. It works like TCP but negated. Companies will drop the offers until the hiring success rate tanks, and then slowly creep it up until they get the headcount they need. The question is, what kind of offers are the remote candidates living in Dirtcheapville, MI going to accept?
- talmr 6y ago
  To be fair - I used to live in Ohio and my parents and I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment that cost $600/mo about fifteen years ago. You could buy a 5 bedroom house for $250k. The school district I attended was also top notch. It was a great family area and I remember the mall, rec center, and numerous parks. I checked zillow recently and 5 bedroom homes are ~$300k and apartments are about $800/mo. At the time, my dad was the sole breadwinner and he was earning about $40k a year. I'm out in California right now making a comfortable six figure salary, but I can't really afford a 1+ million dollar house in a good area where I can send my future kids to school. If I was earning even $100k a year, I could comfortably afford to live in that Ohio suburb about 15 miles from a major metro.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    So if you lived in that Ohio suburb, your code quality would be reduced vs living in California?
    - talmr 6y ago
      I don't think my code quality would be reduced by location. If anything, I'd probably have less stress and more time to learn and improve. Making software and learning new stuff is pretty much a hobby, and more time to devote to hobby would be awesome. Personally, I have not ever worked at a remote-friendly company. If the tides were to change and facilitating remote work becomes a first class priority, then I don't see why I couldn't thrive. My biggest irk right now is we can't just have ad hoc breakout sessions with different stakeholders (product, ux, eng) and come to quick conclusions. Zoom meetings are horrible, and I'm not really sure which tools are great for easily whiteboarding ideas. Someone recommended Google Jamboard. Another concern moving inwards would be that I lose access to the hordes of other like-minded individuals who love technology. I won't be getting the same quality of meetups there for sure, since the area isn't a tech hub.
zaidf 6y ago
People won't continue making their current SF salary by working out of Farmville, Ohio. I think this point is missed by many I fully expect Twitter, for example, to come out with salary adjustment policies for people who want to work from home from an entirely different city and state
- sigfubar 6y ago
  There are plenty of people who moved out of NYC/SF and continued making their NYC/SF salary while working remotely from Nowhere, USA. Companies who cut pay based on locale will soon see their workforces dwindle to nothing.
  - cpascal 6y ago
    This works if you stay with the company you were working for in NYC/SF and then transition to being remote.
- geddy 6y ago
  I'm always reading about job openings throughout my country (or world, for that matter) that offer 100% remote positions, and initially the huge difference in salary was pretty jarring. Then I hopped on Trulia for some less populated (not rural, but certainly not close-to-the-city-suburbs), and realized the mortgage for a house twice my size would cost the property taxes I pay now. Literally talking about a $25,000/year difference in just the mortgage. In other words, what I pay just in property taxes annually here, is how much a house costs annually that's double the size, there. Suddenly I didn't mind seeing zeroes falling off the salary.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    There's a concept known as operating leverage which applies here: fixed costs, even if high, mean that increases in revenue multiply net income. And of course by moving outside a greater metro area, you're also saving money by choosing not to consume any amenities of private schools, airports, large hospitals, high infrastructure recreation, etc.
subsubzero 6y ago
One thing this doesn't mention is the pay cuts that happen if you do decide to relocate to cheaper areas. Both me and my Wife's company have pay bands based on geographical region(most employees know nothing about this and most companies employ these salary COL changes for relocation) and certain regions you can take a big pay cut. Say your salary in the bay area is 100k for example, move to the South, say Florida and it typically drops 30%(typically as low as they chop your salary) so your new salary is 70k, Denver area is 15% paycut etc. These numbers change somewhat from company to company but they do exist for most companies and should be factored in.
- daenz 6y ago
  What's the rationale for this?
  - city41 6y ago
    From what I understand, the employee loses leverage. If you don’t like the lower salary, often your only option is another company in your area that will also pay an equivalently low salary. Hopefully if enough companies start hiring remote workers, our leverage will go up.
    - bhupy 6y ago
      I'm not so sure that the leverage will change. If remote work were to go mainstream and that became the norm, employers won't pay different salaries based on location: they will pay one salary based on the cheapest location. It's not that different from outsourcing work today — there might exist manufacturing workers in the Rust belt that are capable of doing manufacturing, but employers just shift all their supply chains out to cheaper countries, since there's little difference between a Chinese person's labor, and a Pennsylvanian's labor. Similarly, if everyone is remote, then the difference between employees that live in low COL areas and employees that live in high COL areas starts to really blur. There might be exceptions to this for extremely high skilled engineers, but they're marginal cases. If we move to an all-remote (or even a "most-remote") engineering culture, then software engineering jobs will simply be "outsourced" to the cheapest COL areas.
dougmwne 6y ago
It must be tempting to make even a short-term move out of the Bay area. If your lease is coming due and you were planning on looking for a new place anyway, why not move back in with family or get a short-term rental somewhere further out. Rents will likely be going down over the next few years, not up, so it's a terrible time to lock yourself into a new lease. And we can expect re-opening to happen slowly, so there should be plenty of warning for most workplaces before you're required to be in the office again. Based on my Zoom calls, my co-workers have been fleeing the city, moving back in with parents, moving into parents' second homes or picking up vacation rentals on the coast or in the mountains.
- timtam2 6y ago
  I live in SF but rented a vacation rental for May and June. No point to live in my 600sqft condo when everything is closed and I can rent a 2000sqft house with a pool for small change.
  - codemati 6y ago
    I'm planning to do the same. Put things into storage and get a better view. Any advice finding a place?
    - dougmwne 6y ago
      Check airbnb, vrbo, craigslist, or if you're looking at a vacation hotspot, local realtors often do monthly vacation rentals. Monthly rentals are often much cheaper on a per-day basis than weekly rentals. Your SF rent is going to go extremely far just about anywhere else. I am renting a 2br vacation house on the beach for less than the price of studio.
    - timtam2 6y ago
      VRBO caps the platform fee at $500, but on airbnb it's uncapped. I messaged several listings directly to see if they would offer a discount for a longer stay, and several said they would.
- mrep 6y ago
brenden2 6y ago
Desirable areas will always be (relatively) more expensive. Even if we see significant deflation (which is unlikely given the scale of money printing), these areas (NYC, SF) will probably remain expensive so long as they remain significant culturally and economically. When it becomes uncool to live in SF or NYC, then perhaps people will move to places like Wyoming en masse.
- jurassic 6y ago
  The cultural amenities of cities are in serious jeopardy, generally. Many of the restaurants, clubs, theaters, museums, bars, etc that make the city a desirable place may never reopen.
  - brenden2 6y ago
    Sure, but that's likely only temporary. And if it's not, then we probably have much worse things to worry about than which cities are hip.
  - esoterica 6y ago
    Restaurants and bars require very little capital to open (the low barrier to entry explains why margins are so low in the industry). Even if many of the existing restaurants go out of business, new ones will quickly open up once the pandemic is over and people start going out again (which might take a little while, to be fair).
  - thehappypm 6y ago
    They'll all be replaced. Theaters, for example, will rebound because they're still sitting there, even if they need a new owner. The demand for food, drinks, and entertainment will still exist, even if it's reduced somewhat, and the costs of opening a business and low competition will make for some very tempting business opportunities for entrepreneurs.
  - asdff 6y ago
    These are also the same cultural amenities that make a rural area desirable (what's really left after you've listed everything). These businesses are far more likely to come back in cities with different investors, they may never open up again in rural areas.
mips_avatar 6y ago
I'm considering it. But I am pretty sure that once things open up, my office culture is going back to one where all the important decisions get made in the hallways after a meeting. Being remote in that scenario means you have no say, and you miss out on important information.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- city41 6y ago
  Being the only remote person on a team is really hard. I’ve both done it and been on teams where someone else does it. It’s less than ideal for everyone. It’s a constant nag that never goes away (oh did you remember to join the hangout for Matt?) and pretty much no matter what you miss out on a good deal of communication. I definitely think remote would work best when everyone is doing it.
  - duderific 6y ago
    I'm really concerned about this. My Bay Area company is planning to go back to the office soon, but my kids are still home so I need to be home to help out with the child care. I'm one of the only ones on the team with little kids at home, so I'm going to be "that guy" that they have to remember to dial in. Hopefully the schools will get back open soon but it's not looking real good for that.
- geddy 6y ago
  Sounds like process needs to be changed on a higher level, not that an ever-growing population needs a slavish devotion to sitting in ever-growing levels of traffic.
city41 6y ago
I am moving from San Jose to Michigan on Saturday. My company has allowed me to continue working remotely. I know of a few others doing the same.
- confounded 6y ago
  Care to talk about your motivations? Why Michigan?
  - city41 6y ago
    Mostly just for personal reasons. My wife and I are both from there and our family is there too.
Grimm1 6y ago
Yeah, I'm an at risk group for this thing and I'm not commuting into an office for the foreseeable future, my office has been good so far but if they don't make an arrangement with me to continue this when our half baked state reopenings happen then I'll find a place that will.
greendave 6y ago
> Just as people can work from anywhere, employers can hire from anywhere. "The talent pool gets massive," he says. "Why would my employer pay me SF wages?" This is sort of a non sequitur. These calculations are already happening and becoming more common, regardless of whether some individuals choose to move or not. It's my hope that many people do move away though. Even setting aside the horrible traffic and insane housing costs, it's just not healthy for the region to be so highly dependent on tech jobs.
egonschiele 6y ago
I left SF a year ago to settle in the midwest. Best decision I ever made.
Finnucane 6y ago
If even a smallish fraction—say 15 or 20 percent— of the workers who could move and work remotely do so, that could have a pretty significant impact on local economies. Even if wages adjust some, you’d still see essentially a redistribution of wealth from highly concentrated areas to those less so. A shift of say, 2 percent in apartment vacancy rates is nontrivial. On the whole it could be a net positive, for individuals and for stressed cities.
- shuckles 6y ago
  1 in every 5 employees relocating is a huge proportion.
kbrwn 6y ago
This is constantly brought up on HN in the WFH threads. Your employer cannot arbitrarily reduce your salary. The reduction has to be agreed upon by the employee or the employer has to terminate employment and rehire to reduce salary. Very few big tech companies will update salary for a intra country move. It seems to happen most often when an employee relocates to a new country rather than a new state. This is because the new country requires a different work agreement and must follow different labor laws.
- stagger87 6y ago
  Are you sure about that? Everything I read says an employer can reduce your pay without reason at any time. Can you elaborate?
- nkohari 6y ago
  > Your employer cannot arbitrarily reduce your salary. The reduction has to be agreed upon by the employee or the employer has to terminate employment and rehire to reduce salary. There might be state regulations to this effect -- and IANAL -- but there's no such federal law in the US. An employer can cut an employee's pay at any point to any value above the minimum wage, as long as they inform the employee their pay has been cut.
TrackerFF 6y ago
Living and purchasing a home in a very high COL city feels like a marathon. You know that you won't have paid off your home until many decades later, and you need to maximize your earnings, while minimizing your risks of becoming unemployed. In other words, it can motivate you to become really good at something, but at the same time inducing a lot of stress. Living in cheap areas, feels very different. I recently move back home, and could pay off my home with two years worth of salary. That's it, no mortgage or anything - just the occasional renovations / upgrades. On the other hand, now that I'm not chained to a mortgage, I need to invest more of my money - in the case I want to move back to somewhere expensive. Job market isn't anywhere near the same, and salaries are much more compressed. Mid 6 figure salaries are unheard-of, unless you own a company. But it doesn't feel like a rat-race, where you need to hustle all the time.
vinay_ys 6y ago
For the 20-30 something with no kids who are showing higher productivity working from home, once the outdoor/social life returns to normal, their productivity will drop. They will want a dedicated office space and discipline of going to an office to reattain that productivity. As a solution to this, we could have lots of satellite offices for people to come in and work but teams are still distributed and remote to each other. This could potentially maintain productivity levels as well as avoid high rents and horrible commutes. This could work only if everyone is still remote to each other relatively. The moment a few of the team members are co-located in the same office, they start having in-person meetings and can collaborate in person, that stark difference people in office vs people remote will emerge. Then it all falls apart.
mcguire 6y ago
"But the trend raises complicated questions. If employees move to a less expensive location, should Twilio adjust their salaries accordingly? “It’s probably not great business practice to pay Bay Area comps in Michigan,” Lake says. And when it comes time to promote, would those employees have the same opportunity to advance as everybody else? “We need to think proactively,” she says." I wouldn't sweat it. After the pandemic has died down, companies will be requiring everybody back into the office and all those people moving to Montana will be packing up again.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Maybe companies will be forced to open offices in Billings if everyone is moving to Montana.
davidw 6y ago
Another thought: those workers and their companies could contribute to changing the situation in Silicon Valley and the rest of California: https://cayimby.org/ https://cayimby.org/ Without a change in housing policy in the US, this just becomes a big game of musical chairs: Guy moves from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon. Portland gets too expensive for some other family, who move to Boise, Idaho. And so on...
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >Guy moves from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon. Portland gets too expensive for some other family, who move to Boise, Idaho. And so on... Yup. It's a fundamental values problem that can't be fixed without a major ideological shift. A large number of people do not believe that people have the right to do more or less whatever they want on their property. Until that is fixed you're always going to have people saying "but you shouldn't be able to build that there".
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Maybe the endgame is that these tech megacorps just do it themselves and build their own cities on empty land.
    - asdff 6y ago
      Google just killed off their condo project. I'm fine with leaving the company town in the past, though. We need more public housing, and less private land speculators.
  - lliamander 6y ago
    Another option could be that living in a big city becomes less necessary. People flocked to these cities in the first place because they were seen as sources of social opportunities (jobs, venture capital, social networks). I would like to see the Internet disaggregate those opportunities.
    - 6y ago
phendrenad2 6y ago
A lot of people came here to comment "you won't make the same salary". Yeah no kidding, but the ratio of salary/COL will be a LOT higher regardless. Don't believe me? Check the chart in the article.
alexose 6y ago
I welcome anyone trying to leave SV to come live in beautiful Southern Oregon. Great weather, not too crowded, and still drivable to Seattle and the bay. Come help build our little tech scene!
mobilio 6y ago
Link to article: http://archive.md/dhoUk http://archive.md/dhoUk
throwawaysea 6y ago
It's not just about the rents and finances. Escaping Silicon Valley is also escaping a monoculture. Yes, the Bay has diversity in one sense (for example ethnic backgrounds), but in other ways (diversity of thought) it is very uniform. Urban living is also just one way of living. It's not the way everyone wants or needs to live, and those who want more breathing room can seek that out if they can work remotely. Politics also vary by geographic location, and those who are tired of issues like SF's lack of law enforcement and constant problems with homeless drug addicts have more viable alternatives now. Those who have families/friends in other places will be freer to live near them. I think this is going to be great and hope to see all tech companies adopt remote work.
- paxys 6y ago
  Do you really think you're escaping "monoculture" by moving to Ohio?
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    It would at least be a different monoculture. And depending on the city, even less of one as East Coasters are fleeing their own respective sky-high rents to Ohio: https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/ex-new-yorkers-are-flocking-to-this-midwest-sanctuary/ https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/ex-new-yorkers-are-flocking-to...
    - asdff 6y ago
      I think people are imagining this will be pretty plug and play, but there will be a shock for sure if your standards of living and expectations come from larger and more diverse metros. I grew up in Cleveland, and lived in those listed areas in Columbus. They feel small, like very small. The 'active' walkable part of Columbus is like 2 miles on high street, where home prices are the highest and continually higher with every year. North of this is Ohio State, which I love but it's a weird place to hang out if you are over 25 and a football game isn't going on. South of these two miles on high street are downtown, which is empty after 5pm because it's all state government buildings and offices, and the german village which is admittedly quaint but not worth uprooting your life for imo, every city has a cute older area with $5 lattes. The rest of the city is suburbs stretching out until it blurs with farmland, indistinguishable from any of the other suburbs. Most of them don't even bother building sidewalks they are so dependent on the car. Public transit in Columbus is crap, basically a pity gesture from the city saying 'yes, we do have buses' and that's about it. Cleveland is an overall nicer city than Columbus. It has older bones and is pretty well laid out on the east side with a few RTA rail lines. There are a lot of older neighborhoods that date to when Rockefeller lived here and made his fortune with Standard Oil along the riverbanks. You can get a mansion for ~$75k a bathroom right on the RTA line in Shaker Heights. The metropark system is also enormous. However, Cleveland never recovered from white flight. The population of the greater metro area has been stagnant for 50 years, while the city proper has lost half its population in that time. Despite the good bones, Cleveland feels hollowed out as a result, and there is a lot of space now devoted to surface parking lots that used to be an apartment building in a formerly lively neighborhood. Still, there are a lot more walkable neighborhoods than Columbus and more options for living, but the city isn't growing nearly as fast as other metro areas and will not shore up the damage done to city life from white flight in my lifetime imo. I'd say about half the people from my high school class still live in Ohio, the rest took better positions elsewhere. Coupled with the limited number of employers and therefore lack of jobs, and the six months of depression (sometimes it would only snow once or twice, the rest of winter everything will be grey and brown and muddy and dead, and 'scenic' autumn only lasts for like two weeks anyway), and I haven't looked back since moving west. In terms of my career, physical health now that I can be more active outdoors all year, and my mental health (Cleveland in particular only gets 80 days of sunshine a year), this was the greatest decision of my life. Plus I can actually get proper ethnic food, you should see what they call a taco in Cleveland. If I want to visit, can't beat a 5hr direct flight.
kelvin0 6y ago
Well for those who stay, the rent prices might plummet if there's enough of an exodus.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vdnkh 6y ago
I feel like most of HN is missing something here, of no fault of their own because they're not in my demographic (20-something yuppie). Young people want to live in cities. They're fun, exciting, and enable a robust social life. Moving to rural Ohio or Michigan, or even a "lesser" metro in the midwest is not the same as living in SF or NYC in terms of social opportunity. I work remote and I live in Brooklyn and I think its great. I don't need a car or a big house. But unlike most of the commenters here, I don't have kids or a wife. Essentially, I put my money towards a better social life. I'm not saying that my way is better, it's just that the whole "move to a big cheap house in the midwest, bro" line that HN loves to throw out is not for everyone.
- bluGill 6y ago
  What do you get in SF that you can't get in Des Moines? I lived in Des Moines until last year and I find most answers to this question are wrong: you can in fact get it in Des Moines. Sometimes Des Moines is even better, though I'll admit in most cases the vastly smaller size limits quantity of choices.
  - pb7 6y ago
    Diverse younger people from all around the world that are trying to reach their full potential.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      You get that in Des Moines. Not nearly as many but they are there.
      - pb7 6y ago
        I have nothing against Des Moines so I'm trying to tread lightly here but I have a hard time believing someone from say London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, or Sydney would move across the world to end up in Des Moines at even a fraction of the rate as New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. It's a fine place, I'm sure, but it lacks global pull that would bring in talented people from all corners of the earth.
tylerjwilk00 6y ago
First, these are NOT normal work from home times. This is currently the worst time to experience what work from home is truely like. Second, if your job requires a lot of face to face interaction them WFH will NOT be a good fit. Third, if your org tries to do remote communication in the same way it does place based communication. It will not be a good fit. BUT, if remote communication is first class citizen, conditions are back to the normal state of 4 months ago, your job duties are well suited to individual creative contributions, work from home CAN be a great fit.
hintymad 6y ago
An honest question: isn't this what local governments want? I see cities and counties implement two policies: rent control, and blocking development of high-density residential areas. Both measurements will limit supplies (while benefiting incumbents), so naturally people would move away.
shibeouya 6y ago
I can't think of anyone in my office who wants to permanently work from home. We talk about it every week, and it's become clear that everyone is looking forward to the day where offices reopen. I really don't see this trend of people relocating. And for those considering it, once they are made aware that salaries will scale with location it's probably going to be a strong enough deterrent.
peter51 6y ago
How does everyone feel about moving to Sacramento and upgrading your living spaces if you were able to commute to work on a flight to the Silicon Valley in less than 30 minutes if and when you have to be physically present at the office so you do not suffer a detrimental effect on your career that "aripickar" highlights. If you feel positive about this idea, give us a little information about your commute needs via the form below and at what price point this flight would need to be at for you to justify the move. We will publish the results here so everyone can see ( names redacted obviously) so you can get an idea if this is just a few folks talking or if this pressure to move out of the Valley is a real phenomena. https://www.uamcah.com/sacramento-to-bay-area https://www.uamcah.com/sacramento-to-bay-area

258 points by kjhughes 6y ago

option 6y ago

If a company want to hire remote workers, why do that in US or Europe?

ruffrey 6y ago
Time zones are closer, cultural fit, communication style fit, easier travel and onsite when necessary, more familiar tax schemes.
thehappypm 6y ago
My company hires a lot of Croatian software engineers. Most of them speak great English. 1/3 are very, very good, 1/3 OK, 1/3 literally terrible. But we rotate the bad ones out and keep the good ones, and the rumor is they cost about 1/3 or 1/2 of an American worker. I honestly feel that the American software engineer may be in trouble if remote really does take off -- 2 solid Croatian guys for the price of 1 tech bro is a very good deal.
- asdff 6y ago
  I expect to see a lot of companies doing this. You read the same exact docs whether you live in SF or Bulgaria. If anything you have better math skills outside the U.S. which helps you more than a language barrier would matter. Some might argue the best engineering is here, maybe that's correct maybe not, but companies rarely want the best. They just want the cheapest possible tool for the job they think they have. If a remote dev is significantly cheaper than a U.S. based remote dev, no business will be paying that premium.
  - thehappypm 6y ago
    It's worth mentioning that none of our tech leads are outsourced. All of the very demanding architecture work and decision making happens here. A lot of that yields a spec that needs a hundred hours of dev time -- for example, "update the iOS and Android apps to match the redesign we did on Mobile Web". You don't need a US based engineer for that type of work, but you sure as hell want the best possible guy designing the architecture and doing code review.

maxdo 6y ago

How about competition, the biggest reason they got 200k+ a year was their location. Now they will start competing with the non SV market.

rconti 6y ago

Anecdotally, it surprises me how many people are still buying homes during the pandemic. Region-wide, prices fell 2.9% in the Bay Area in 2019; it "feels like" prices merely held relatively steady, and the selling prices I'm seeing the past month or so are on track with that.

schnevets 6y ago

I know this article focused on established players, but I'm curious what the pandemic means for early-phase startups based out of SV and NYC. When every sales pitch and networking event is a Zoom call, you lose any benefit to taking expensive space in a Mission District incubator. If aspiring founders leave the city (even temporarily), they may still find success, but are they going to relocate back to the pricey areas when it's safe to open up? I've spent the last 5 years hoping for a catalyst that moves tech out of the two biggest players so it can actually help stimulate different regions of the US. Maybe the quarantine will finally trigger this

gregwebs 6y ago
I think a big factor to Silicon Valley is VCs wanting in person meetings with founders and to have in person board meetings. If VCs realize they can take pitches and do board meetings over Zoom they can start investing outside Silicon Valley and startups don't have to start and then stay here.

bradlys 6y ago

Meh - people are going to be experiencing a wake up call in a couple years when they lose that job and need another. I really doubt remote based jobs will go up in income now. I expect them to fall - if anything. (Increased supply of workers wanting to go remote cause housing too expensive in big cities - can you imagine how many people are craving a bigger home now?) Can't imagine how devastating it will be when you see your household income fall from $500k+/yr to $200k/yr. Junior ain't going to private schools anymore.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

I left a decade ago. And my standard of living went way up.

ruffrey 6y ago
Where'd you go, if you don't mind me asking...?
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Midwest, college town, house in the country on 80 acres. My kids grew up, they could walk around outside all day and still be at home. They could invite friends to visit, do projects, shoot, saw, drive carts, dig holes. All three are Eagle Scouts, Engineers, black belts. Wife and I have 7 gardens plus landscaping projects. Two sheds 20X50, tractors and implements. Orchard. All for less than that old house in San Jose.
  - 535188B17C93743 6y ago
    Good to hear you're happy
  - ruffrey 6y ago
    Incredible. I wonder, how different were sub-cultural an social aspects, versus the Bay?

esotericn 6y ago

The pairing of working in an office with a hellish commute is a bit odd. Maybe SF really is a parallel universe. Here in the UK, basically anyone earning a tech salary can afford to live within 10-20 mins cycle of work, even if they want children. You won't have a home with a garden and all the rest of the knick knacks, sure, but that's a different discussion.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
Most techies in SF could afford to live relatively close to work, or without roommates, or both. The reason why they don't is still due to the high rent though. When living with a roommate or two, or living a bit further away means you get an extra $1000+ a month to spend on other things, that can be very enticing.
- shuckles 6y ago
  This suggests that it's not only just that rents are high, but also that the current housing stock is not configured for the type of demand (small homes for few people, instead of large homes for lots of people).
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Yeah, I tend to agree. A lot of young people happily live in group houses; I suspect a lot more would if it didn't mean compromising on floor space or bathroom availability.
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  This isn't true, at least of all the tech workers I've worked with. None of them could afford to live within a 30min commute of a downtown SF startup.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    That sounds rather implausible, given the average dev salary in SF and the existence of BART. For example, living in Daly City would give you a ~30min commute, and the average rent there is $2,500, so $30,000 of post-tax income annually. High, obviously, but certainly doable on most SF dev salaries; Hired says the average there is 145k gross, so perhaps 100k or so after tax: https://hired.com/page/state-of-salaries https://hired.com/page/state-of-salaries

rootedbox 6y ago

"In 2013, Yahoo Inc. decided its lax policies on working from home had prevented it from innovating and required everyone to come back to the office." -- and now in 2020 Yahoo is an innovative power house...

shuckles 6y ago
Just have to be more innovative than the counterfactual, which was probably the case.

starpilot 6y ago

People are going to be moving Mountain House or Reno at farthest, not Cleveland. Though the thought of buying a literal mansion near Boise with your techbux is amusing.

jameslevy 6y ago
Mountain House near Tracy? I don't think I've ever heard of Mountain House before.
- starpilot 6y ago
  Don't get me wrong, it's kind of a weird planned community in the desert. I only know it because my coworker moved there and had a 1-2 hour commute into San Jose.
Apocryphon 6y ago
Idaho has been receiving a huge influx of Californians. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-10/go-back-to-california-wave-of-newcomers-fuels-backlash-in-boise https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-10/go-back-... https://www.idahostatesman.com/opinion/editorials/article237245439.html https://www.idahostatesman.com/opinion/editorials/article237... https://www.businessinsider.com/why-millennials-are-moving-from-california-to-boise-idaho-2019-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-millennials-are-moving-f...
- starpilot 6y ago
  Yep. I think the overall migration as been: Bay Area -> Seattle -> Boise -> Nevada?

__sy__ 6y ago

"[Living in] a one-bedroom rental in South San Francisco, a short commute from Facebook Inc.’s offices in Menlo Park" -- might want to edit the "short" part. I think that's at least a 1-hour commute, EACH way :)

saagarjha 6y ago

One interesting side effect is that local schools are already seeing declining enrollment as families can't afford to live here. I have hear rumors that my local school district, CUSD, may have to close a school and reduce staff because they don't have enough students.

epistasis 6y ago

An evergreen headline... In the 90s I remember hearing this too. Use the high salary and property value increases to build a nestegg, but keep an eye out for other geographic opportunities because the locals are determined to keep you out, as a class, even if they are friendly one to one. These days, the property value scam has been going so long that new high wage workers are often locked out for many years, to the benefit of all prior arrivals. But same story otherwise.

malandrew 6y ago
Well to some degree it actually happened. All the activity in the first dot com book was in the Valley. Afterwards a lot of it migrated up to San Francisco. Now that both places are saturated. It's starting to happen in the East Bay. After San Francisco and the East Bay have started saturating, other places were put on the map like Seattle, NYC, Austin and Pittsburgh.
lanewinfield 6y ago
One minor difference in the story: a global pandemic
- arbuge 6y ago
  How do you think that will change things this time around exactly?
  - rsanek 6y ago
    I think it's already forced many employers that perviously weren't as remote-friendly to move more aggressively towards it. Already we've seen that in a big way at Twitter (see post from 2 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647)
  - lanewinfield 6y ago
    It's simple. There needed to be an outside force to push large scale testing of remote to convince people to try it. That's the pandemic. It wasn't going to happen on large scale without it. Now that it's been proven in many fields to be viable, it's got a much higher likelihood of sticking than before.

dfgtrhrer 6y ago

And I'm considering to become a billionaire this year. So what?

raldi 6y ago

“I think it's fair to say that Silicon Valley is dead.” —Altavista founder, 1993 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.folklore.computers/bvE0Ka5nCnM/NAIOQnrEyCAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.folklore.comp... (Note: Google Groups links don’t work on mobile unless you Request Desktop Site in Chrome)

rajnathani 6y ago
Interesting, however he did have a point about prop 13.

cactus2093 6y ago

I'm certainly daydreaming about this, as someone living in SF right now. But IMO things are still too uncertain to pull the trigger on making a huge move. And I wonder if the likeliest scenario, is that everyone strongly considers doing this, but then we all slowly get used to the "new normal" and by the time it's clear one way or the other what the future is starting to look like, we're past the peak of the virus (maybe it's early 2021 and there's a vaccine starting to roll out) and everyone just kind of settles back into mostly the same life they previously had due to inertia. And anecdotally I've heard very few people say they now want to stay fully remote forever. What I've heard instead is people talking about how they hope that 2-3 days a week in the office might become the new normal. That might open up your options a bit, maybe that makes you willing to commute 1 - 1.5hrs instead of 30 min - 1 hr. But that wouldn't allow anyone to leave the metro area. In fact, maybe this scenario actually increases cost of living because now you need to both be close enough to downtown to commute a few days a week, and have enough space for a dedicated home office so you can work from home productively the other few days a week.

FalconSensei 6y ago
> In fact, maybe this scenario actually increases cost of living because now you need to both be close enough to downtown to commute a few days a week, and have enough space for a dedicated home office so you can work from home productively the other few days a week. I agree completely. Like, I decided to live in a small apartment downtown Vancouver because the office is really close. To be comfortable working from home, I need a bigger place with an extra room. Either I go back to the office, or I move away from downtown and don't go back to the office.
ghaff 6y ago
The Bay Area arguably doesn't lend itself as well to a part-time WFH situation as other cities do. Given that it's not just the core city that's expensive but the whole peninsula where most of the jobs are located and even most of the surrounding areas. You can get out of it with a long enough occasional commute--though then you're probably also too far out to regularly take advantage of urban culture, etc. By contrast, somewhere like Boston assuming the jobs are even in the city (many aren't), a drive that's 60-90 minutes depending on time of day puts you into pretty reasonably priced exurbs.

aripickar 6y ago

I'm pretty bearish on the pandemic actually leading to massive change in the number of people permanently working from home. My boss put out a survey a week or two ago among my org (30 or so people), and 70% said that they want to work from the office, full time, 20% said some time or most of the time, and 10% said fully remote. And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home during the pandemic (young, no kids, etc). I just don't think that this will change much. There is just too much detrimental effect one one's career from not being seen at the office. For a company that's not fully remote (i.e. gitlab), people who are fully remote are going to fall behind in promotions, etc. There's just not enough benefit for people who don't hate the bay area.

caseysoftware 6y ago
I've seen/heard different numbers from elsewhere: 20% want to work from home permanently 20% want to get back to the office full time 60% want flexibility somewhere in between Personally, I think the specific breakdown is less important than companies realizing that letting people be remote can improve work/life balance, reduces office space needs, and they have most of the infrastructure to support it. As an industry, we still need to figure out mentorship and career development for remote/partially-remote teams, but I'm optimistic on that front.
- take_a_breath 6y ago
  ==reduces office space needs== While increasing their employees home-space needs. People will need bigger houses and apartments if everyone is going to work from home long-term.
  - neutronicus 6y ago
    Which they will find, for the same price, out in the sticks when they don't need to drive in.
    - take_a_breath 6y ago

lalaland1125 6y ago

This could finally help solve the housing crisis in many of America's large cities. Every employee who moves out frees up one apartment for everyone else. 30,000 employees leaving is equivalent to building 30,000 apartments.

mjg59 6y ago
The number of tech workers in the bay who have zero roommates is a lot smaller than you seem to think.
- EVdotIO 6y ago
  Yeah, one of the reasons I left. A 30 year old with a 100k job needing roommates is absurd.

mikeryan 6y ago

When I read these I feel its way to early to start making determinations on whether "Working for Home" is here to stay. It's going to work for some and not for others, but a few exceptional months with no clear forecasts on what happens next makes long term decisions terribly difficult. I'll be fascinated to see how this workout for Google and Microsoft coming into Q1 of 2021 compared to how things worked out for Yahoo! when they banned working from home a few years ago. I may be more of a bear on this than most on here but I don't think working from home is going to be quite as successful as many think.

valar_m 6y ago

Christy Lake, chief people officer at Twilio: > “It’s probably not great business practice to pay Bay Area comps in Michigan,” Lake says. And when it comes time to promote, would those employees have the same opportunity to advance as everybody else? “We need to think proactively,” she says. So, in case anyone is applying to Twilio, heads up, I guess.

foobarian 6y ago
The market will take care of itself. It works like TCP but negated. Companies will drop the offers until the hiring success rate tanks, and then slowly creep it up until they get the headcount they need. The question is, what kind of offers are the remote candidates living in Dirtcheapville, MI going to accept?
talmr 6y ago
To be fair - I used to live in Ohio and my parents and I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment that cost $600/mo about fifteen years ago. You could buy a 5 bedroom house for $250k. The school district I attended was also top notch. It was a great family area and I remember the mall, rec center, and numerous parks. I checked zillow recently and 5 bedroom homes are ~$300k and apartments are about $800/mo. At the time, my dad was the sole breadwinner and he was earning about $40k a year. I'm out in California right now making a comfortable six figure salary, but I can't really afford a 1+ million dollar house in a good area where I can send my future kids to school. If I was earning even $100k a year, I could comfortably afford to live in that Ohio suburb about 15 miles from a major metro.
- luckylion 6y ago
  So if you lived in that Ohio suburb, your code quality would be reduced vs living in California?
  - talmr 6y ago
    I don't think my code quality would be reduced by location. If anything, I'd probably have less stress and more time to learn and improve. Making software and learning new stuff is pretty much a hobby, and more time to devote to hobby would be awesome. Personally, I have not ever worked at a remote-friendly company. If the tides were to change and facilitating remote work becomes a first class priority, then I don't see why I couldn't thrive. My biggest irk right now is we can't just have ad hoc breakout sessions with different stakeholders (product, ux, eng) and come to quick conclusions. Zoom meetings are horrible, and I'm not really sure which tools are great for easily whiteboarding ideas. Someone recommended Google Jamboard. Another concern moving inwards would be that I lose access to the hordes of other like-minded individuals who love technology. I won't be getting the same quality of meetups there for sure, since the area isn't a tech hub.

zaidf 6y ago

People won't continue making their current SF salary by working out of Farmville, Ohio. I think this point is missed by many I fully expect Twitter, for example, to come out with salary adjustment policies for people who want to work from home from an entirely different city and state

sigfubar 6y ago
There are plenty of people who moved out of NYC/SF and continued making their NYC/SF salary while working remotely from Nowhere, USA. Companies who cut pay based on locale will soon see their workforces dwindle to nothing.
- cpascal 6y ago
  This works if you stay with the company you were working for in NYC/SF and then transition to being remote.
geddy 6y ago
I'm always reading about job openings throughout my country (or world, for that matter) that offer 100% remote positions, and initially the huge difference in salary was pretty jarring. Then I hopped on Trulia for some less populated (not rural, but certainly not close-to-the-city-suburbs), and realized the mortgage for a house twice my size would cost the property taxes I pay now. Literally talking about a $25,000/year difference in just the mortgage. In other words, what I pay just in property taxes annually here, is how much a house costs annually that's double the size, there. Suddenly I didn't mind seeing zeroes falling off the salary.
- shuckles 6y ago
  There's a concept known as operating leverage which applies here: fixed costs, even if high, mean that increases in revenue multiply net income. And of course by moving outside a greater metro area, you're also saving money by choosing not to consume any amenities of private schools, airports, large hospitals, high infrastructure recreation, etc.

subsubzero 6y ago

One thing this doesn't mention is the pay cuts that happen if you do decide to relocate to cheaper areas. Both me and my Wife's company have pay bands based on geographical region(most employees know nothing about this and most companies employ these salary COL changes for relocation) and certain regions you can take a big pay cut. Say your salary in the bay area is 100k for example, move to the South, say Florida and it typically drops 30%(typically as low as they chop your salary) so your new salary is 70k, Denver area is 15% paycut etc. These numbers change somewhat from company to company but they do exist for most companies and should be factored in.

daenz 6y ago
What's the rationale for this?
- city41 6y ago
  From what I understand, the employee loses leverage. If you don’t like the lower salary, often your only option is another company in your area that will also pay an equivalently low salary. Hopefully if enough companies start hiring remote workers, our leverage will go up.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    I'm not so sure that the leverage will change. If remote work were to go mainstream and that became the norm, employers won't pay different salaries based on location: they will pay one salary based on the cheapest location. It's not that different from outsourcing work today — there might exist manufacturing workers in the Rust belt that are capable of doing manufacturing, but employers just shift all their supply chains out to cheaper countries, since there's little difference between a Chinese person's labor, and a Pennsylvanian's labor. Similarly, if everyone is remote, then the difference between employees that live in low COL areas and employees that live in high COL areas starts to really blur. There might be exceptions to this for extremely high skilled engineers, but they're marginal cases. If we move to an all-remote (or even a "most-remote") engineering culture, then software engineering jobs will simply be "outsourced" to the cheapest COL areas.

dougmwne 6y ago

It must be tempting to make even a short-term move out of the Bay area. If your lease is coming due and you were planning on looking for a new place anyway, why not move back in with family or get a short-term rental somewhere further out. Rents will likely be going down over the next few years, not up, so it's a terrible time to lock yourself into a new lease. And we can expect re-opening to happen slowly, so there should be plenty of warning for most workplaces before you're required to be in the office again. Based on my Zoom calls, my co-workers have been fleeing the city, moving back in with parents, moving into parents' second homes or picking up vacation rentals on the coast or in the mountains.

timtam2 6y ago
I live in SF but rented a vacation rental for May and June. No point to live in my 600sqft condo when everything is closed and I can rent a 2000sqft house with a pool for small change.
- codemati 6y ago
  I'm planning to do the same. Put things into storage and get a better view. Any advice finding a place?
  - dougmwne 6y ago
    Check airbnb, vrbo, craigslist, or if you're looking at a vacation hotspot, local realtors often do monthly vacation rentals. Monthly rentals are often much cheaper on a per-day basis than weekly rentals. Your SF rent is going to go extremely far just about anywhere else. I am renting a 2br vacation house on the beach for less than the price of studio.
  - timtam2 6y ago
    VRBO caps the platform fee at $500, but on airbnb it's uncapped. I messaged several listings directly to see if they would offer a discount for a longer stay, and several said they would.
mrep 6y ago

brenden2 6y ago

Desirable areas will always be (relatively) more expensive. Even if we see significant deflation (which is unlikely given the scale of money printing), these areas (NYC, SF) will probably remain expensive so long as they remain significant culturally and economically. When it becomes uncool to live in SF or NYC, then perhaps people will move to places like Wyoming en masse.

jurassic 6y ago
The cultural amenities of cities are in serious jeopardy, generally. Many of the restaurants, clubs, theaters, museums, bars, etc that make the city a desirable place may never reopen.
- brenden2 6y ago
  Sure, but that's likely only temporary. And if it's not, then we probably have much worse things to worry about than which cities are hip.
- esoterica 6y ago
  Restaurants and bars require very little capital to open (the low barrier to entry explains why margins are so low in the industry). Even if many of the existing restaurants go out of business, new ones will quickly open up once the pandemic is over and people start going out again (which might take a little while, to be fair).
- thehappypm 6y ago
  They'll all be replaced. Theaters, for example, will rebound because they're still sitting there, even if they need a new owner. The demand for food, drinks, and entertainment will still exist, even if it's reduced somewhat, and the costs of opening a business and low competition will make for some very tempting business opportunities for entrepreneurs.
- asdff 6y ago
  These are also the same cultural amenities that make a rural area desirable (what's really left after you've listed everything). These businesses are far more likely to come back in cities with different investors, they may never open up again in rural areas.

mips_avatar 6y ago

I'm considering it. But I am pretty sure that once things open up, my office culture is going back to one where all the important decisions get made in the hallways after a meeting. Being remote in that scenario means you have no say, and you miss out on important information.

deleted 6y ago
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city41 6y ago
Being the only remote person on a team is really hard. I’ve both done it and been on teams where someone else does it. It’s less than ideal for everyone. It’s a constant nag that never goes away (oh did you remember to join the hangout for Matt?) and pretty much no matter what you miss out on a good deal of communication. I definitely think remote would work best when everyone is doing it.
- duderific 6y ago
  I'm really concerned about this. My Bay Area company is planning to go back to the office soon, but my kids are still home so I need to be home to help out with the child care. I'm one of the only ones on the team with little kids at home, so I'm going to be "that guy" that they have to remember to dial in. Hopefully the schools will get back open soon but it's not looking real good for that.
geddy 6y ago
Sounds like process needs to be changed on a higher level, not that an ever-growing population needs a slavish devotion to sitting in ever-growing levels of traffic.

city41 6y ago

I am moving from San Jose to Michigan on Saturday. My company has allowed me to continue working remotely. I know of a few others doing the same.

confounded 6y ago
Care to talk about your motivations? Why Michigan?
- city41 6y ago
  Mostly just for personal reasons. My wife and I are both from there and our family is there too.

Grimm1 6y ago

Yeah, I'm an at risk group for this thing and I'm not commuting into an office for the foreseeable future, my office has been good so far but if they don't make an arrangement with me to continue this when our half baked state reopenings happen then I'll find a place that will.

greendave 6y ago

> Just as people can work from anywhere, employers can hire from anywhere. "The talent pool gets massive," he says. "Why would my employer pay me SF wages?" This is sort of a non sequitur. These calculations are already happening and becoming more common, regardless of whether some individuals choose to move or not. It's my hope that many people do move away though. Even setting aside the horrible traffic and insane housing costs, it's just not healthy for the region to be so highly dependent on tech jobs.

egonschiele 6y ago

I left SF a year ago to settle in the midwest. Best decision I ever made.

Finnucane 6y ago

If even a smallish fraction—say 15 or 20 percent— of the workers who could move and work remotely do so, that could have a pretty significant impact on local economies. Even if wages adjust some, you’d still see essentially a redistribution of wealth from highly concentrated areas to those less so. A shift of say, 2 percent in apartment vacancy rates is nontrivial. On the whole it could be a net positive, for individuals and for stressed cities.

shuckles 6y ago
1 in every 5 employees relocating is a huge proportion.

kbrwn 6y ago

This is constantly brought up on HN in the WFH threads. Your employer cannot arbitrarily reduce your salary. The reduction has to be agreed upon by the employee or the employer has to terminate employment and rehire to reduce salary. Very few big tech companies will update salary for a intra country move. It seems to happen most often when an employee relocates to a new country rather than a new state. This is because the new country requires a different work agreement and must follow different labor laws.

stagger87 6y ago
Are you sure about that? Everything I read says an employer can reduce your pay without reason at any time. Can you elaborate?
nkohari 6y ago
> Your employer cannot arbitrarily reduce your salary. The reduction has to be agreed upon by the employee or the employer has to terminate employment and rehire to reduce salary. There might be state regulations to this effect -- and IANAL -- but there's no such federal law in the US. An employer can cut an employee's pay at any point to any value above the minimum wage, as long as they inform the employee their pay has been cut.

TrackerFF 6y ago

Living and purchasing a home in a very high COL city feels like a marathon. You know that you won't have paid off your home until many decades later, and you need to maximize your earnings, while minimizing your risks of becoming unemployed. In other words, it can motivate you to become really good at something, but at the same time inducing a lot of stress. Living in cheap areas, feels very different. I recently move back home, and could pay off my home with two years worth of salary. That's it, no mortgage or anything - just the occasional renovations / upgrades. On the other hand, now that I'm not chained to a mortgage, I need to invest more of my money - in the case I want to move back to somewhere expensive. Job market isn't anywhere near the same, and salaries are much more compressed. Mid 6 figure salaries are unheard-of, unless you own a company. But it doesn't feel like a rat-race, where you need to hustle all the time.

vinay_ys 6y ago

For the 20-30 something with no kids who are showing higher productivity working from home, once the outdoor/social life returns to normal, their productivity will drop. They will want a dedicated office space and discipline of going to an office to reattain that productivity. As a solution to this, we could have lots of satellite offices for people to come in and work but teams are still distributed and remote to each other. This could potentially maintain productivity levels as well as avoid high rents and horrible commutes. This could work only if everyone is still remote to each other relatively. The moment a few of the team members are co-located in the same office, they start having in-person meetings and can collaborate in person, that stark difference people in office vs people remote will emerge. Then it all falls apart.

mcguire 6y ago

"But the trend raises complicated questions. If employees move to a less expensive location, should Twilio adjust their salaries accordingly? “It’s probably not great business practice to pay Bay Area comps in Michigan,” Lake says. And when it comes time to promote, would those employees have the same opportunity to advance as everybody else? “We need to think proactively,” she says." I wouldn't sweat it. After the pandemic has died down, companies will be requiring everybody back into the office and all those people moving to Montana will be packing up again.

Apocryphon 6y ago
Maybe companies will be forced to open offices in Billings if everyone is moving to Montana.

davidw 6y ago

Another thought: those workers and their companies could contribute to changing the situation in Silicon Valley and the rest of California: https://cayimby.org/ https://cayimby.org/ Without a change in housing policy in the US, this just becomes a big game of musical chairs: Guy moves from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon. Portland gets too expensive for some other family, who move to Boise, Idaho. And so on...

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>Guy moves from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon. Portland gets too expensive for some other family, who move to Boise, Idaho. And so on... Yup. It's a fundamental values problem that can't be fixed without a major ideological shift. A large number of people do not believe that people have the right to do more or less whatever they want on their property. Until that is fixed you're always going to have people saying "but you shouldn't be able to build that there".
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Maybe the endgame is that these tech megacorps just do it themselves and build their own cities on empty land.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Google just killed off their condo project. I'm fine with leaving the company town in the past, though. We need more public housing, and less private land speculators.
- lliamander 6y ago
  Another option could be that living in a big city becomes less necessary. People flocked to these cities in the first place because they were seen as sources of social opportunities (jobs, venture capital, social networks). I would like to see the Internet disaggregate those opportunities.
  - 6y ago

phendrenad2 6y ago

A lot of people came here to comment "you won't make the same salary". Yeah no kidding, but the ratio of salary/COL will be a LOT higher regardless. Don't believe me? Check the chart in the article.

alexose 6y ago

I welcome anyone trying to leave SV to come live in beautiful Southern Oregon. Great weather, not too crowded, and still drivable to Seattle and the bay. Come help build our little tech scene!

mobilio 6y ago

Link to article: http://archive.md/dhoUk http://archive.md/dhoUk

throwawaysea 6y ago

It's not just about the rents and finances. Escaping Silicon Valley is also escaping a monoculture. Yes, the Bay has diversity in one sense (for example ethnic backgrounds), but in other ways (diversity of thought) it is very uniform. Urban living is also just one way of living. It's not the way everyone wants or needs to live, and those who want more breathing room can seek that out if they can work remotely. Politics also vary by geographic location, and those who are tired of issues like SF's lack of law enforcement and constant problems with homeless drug addicts have more viable alternatives now. Those who have families/friends in other places will be freer to live near them. I think this is going to be great and hope to see all tech companies adopt remote work.

paxys 6y ago
Do you really think you're escaping "monoculture" by moving to Ohio?
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  It would at least be a different monoculture. And depending on the city, even less of one as East Coasters are fleeing their own respective sky-high rents to Ohio: https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/ex-new-yorkers-are-flocking-to-this-midwest-sanctuary/ https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/ex-new-yorkers-are-flocking-to...
  - asdff 6y ago
    I think people are imagining this will be pretty plug and play, but there will be a shock for sure if your standards of living and expectations come from larger and more diverse metros. I grew up in Cleveland, and lived in those listed areas in Columbus. They feel small, like very small. The 'active' walkable part of Columbus is like 2 miles on high street, where home prices are the highest and continually higher with every year. North of this is Ohio State, which I love but it's a weird place to hang out if you are over 25 and a football game isn't going on. South of these two miles on high street are downtown, which is empty after 5pm because it's all state government buildings and offices, and the german village which is admittedly quaint but not worth uprooting your life for imo, every city has a cute older area with $5 lattes. The rest of the city is suburbs stretching out until it blurs with farmland, indistinguishable from any of the other suburbs. Most of them don't even bother building sidewalks they are so dependent on the car. Public transit in Columbus is crap, basically a pity gesture from the city saying 'yes, we do have buses' and that's about it. Cleveland is an overall nicer city than Columbus. It has older bones and is pretty well laid out on the east side with a few RTA rail lines. There are a lot of older neighborhoods that date to when Rockefeller lived here and made his fortune with Standard Oil along the riverbanks. You can get a mansion for ~$75k a bathroom right on the RTA line in Shaker Heights. The metropark system is also enormous. However, Cleveland never recovered from white flight. The population of the greater metro area has been stagnant for 50 years, while the city proper has lost half its population in that time. Despite the good bones, Cleveland feels hollowed out as a result, and there is a lot of space now devoted to surface parking lots that used to be an apartment building in a formerly lively neighborhood. Still, there are a lot more walkable neighborhoods than Columbus and more options for living, but the city isn't growing nearly as fast as other metro areas and will not shore up the damage done to city life from white flight in my lifetime imo. I'd say about half the people from my high school class still live in Ohio, the rest took better positions elsewhere. Coupled with the limited number of employers and therefore lack of jobs, and the six months of depression (sometimes it would only snow once or twice, the rest of winter everything will be grey and brown and muddy and dead, and 'scenic' autumn only lasts for like two weeks anyway), and I haven't looked back since moving west. In terms of my career, physical health now that I can be more active outdoors all year, and my mental health (Cleveland in particular only gets 80 days of sunshine a year), this was the greatest decision of my life. Plus I can actually get proper ethnic food, you should see what they call a taco in Cleveland. If I want to visit, can't beat a 5hr direct flight.

kelvin0 6y ago

Well for those who stay, the rent prices might plummet if there's enough of an exodus.

deleted 6y ago

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vdnkh 6y ago

I feel like most of HN is missing something here, of no fault of their own because they're not in my demographic (20-something yuppie). Young people want to live in cities. They're fun, exciting, and enable a robust social life. Moving to rural Ohio or Michigan, or even a "lesser" metro in the midwest is not the same as living in SF or NYC in terms of social opportunity. I work remote and I live in Brooklyn and I think its great. I don't need a car or a big house. But unlike most of the commenters here, I don't have kids or a wife. Essentially, I put my money towards a better social life. I'm not saying that my way is better, it's just that the whole "move to a big cheap house in the midwest, bro" line that HN loves to throw out is not for everyone.

bluGill 6y ago
What do you get in SF that you can't get in Des Moines? I lived in Des Moines until last year and I find most answers to this question are wrong: you can in fact get it in Des Moines. Sometimes Des Moines is even better, though I'll admit in most cases the vastly smaller size limits quantity of choices.
- pb7 6y ago
  Diverse younger people from all around the world that are trying to reach their full potential.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    You get that in Des Moines. Not nearly as many but they are there.
    - pb7 6y ago
      I have nothing against Des Moines so I'm trying to tread lightly here but I have a hard time believing someone from say London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, or Sydney would move across the world to end up in Des Moines at even a fraction of the rate as New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. It's a fine place, I'm sure, but it lacks global pull that would bring in talented people from all corners of the earth.

tylerjwilk00 6y ago

First, these are NOT normal work from home times. This is currently the worst time to experience what work from home is truely like. Second, if your job requires a lot of face to face interaction them WFH will NOT be a good fit. Third, if your org tries to do remote communication in the same way it does place based communication. It will not be a good fit. BUT, if remote communication is first class citizen, conditions are back to the normal state of 4 months ago, your job duties are well suited to individual creative contributions, work from home CAN be a great fit.

hintymad 6y ago

An honest question: isn't this what local governments want? I see cities and counties implement two policies: rent control, and blocking development of high-density residential areas. Both measurements will limit supplies (while benefiting incumbents), so naturally people would move away.

shibeouya 6y ago

I can't think of anyone in my office who wants to permanently work from home. We talk about it every week, and it's become clear that everyone is looking forward to the day where offices reopen. I really don't see this trend of people relocating. And for those considering it, once they are made aware that salaries will scale with location it's probably going to be a strong enough deterrent.

peter51 6y ago

How does everyone feel about moving to Sacramento and upgrading your living spaces if you were able to commute to work on a flight to the Silicon Valley in less than 30 minutes if and when you have to be physically present at the office so you do not suffer a detrimental effect on your career that "aripickar" highlights. If you feel positive about this idea, give us a little information about your commute needs via the form below and at what price point this flight would need to be at for you to justify the move. We will publish the results here so everyone can see ( names redacted obviously) so you can get an idea if this is just a few folks talking or if this pressure to move out of the Valley is a real phenomena. https://www.uamcah.com/sacramento-to-bay-area https://www.uamcah.com/sacramento-to-bay-area