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As it happens, tomorrow I’m putting in my 30-day notice to terminate my lease and leave the Bay. (And I’m paying 2 additional months rent in fees to do so) Not

As it happens, tomorrow I’m putting in my 30-day notice to terminate my lease and leave the Bay. (And I’m paying 2 additional months rent in fees to do so) Not being tied to the office fundamentally changes the calculus of choosing where to live. There just aren’t good reasons to live here anymore for so many of us. Even if you enjoy the area, chances are you can get a better deal by moving just a bit further away. Actually, I can pay the 2 months rent in termination fees and move almost literally anywhere else in the state and still come out ahead financially. Since commute time is not a factor, many options have become viable.

sandworm101 6y ago
>> and still come out ahead financially. Ya. Earning a SF wage but living elsewhere is great. But there is a flip side to this coin. As employees realize they can work from home, employers also realize they can have employees work from home. They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages. Those who convert their in-office jobs into work-from-home are a covid oddity. Those who will be hired in the future on the assumption that they will always work remotely will likely face much lower wages. I predict a race for the bottom.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  We’ve been trying to hire these people for ages locally and remotely and we still couldn’t find them so I have no idea where you think all the talent was hiding until covid 19.
  - etimberg 6y ago
    A lot of people, myself included, have been quite hesitant to work remotely until now. I've been pleasantly surprised how well it's gone and would consider a remote position in the future but I think it'd have to be a fully remote team. When offices do return, being one of a few remote workers means you will likely be left out of a lot of teambuilding, conversations, etc.
    - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
      Every team I've been on since 2015 has been distributed, even when my job is "onsite". Sometimes we're in multiple offices, or we have people in the office & people working from home, but the net effect is almost no one can count on going to an office and only working w/ people in the same physical office. We're all largely working remotely anyway, but we're just not being honest about it.
    - harikb 6y ago
      This may be the biggest societal contribution from the pandemic, if and when we survive it
  - chucky_z 6y ago
    I agree with this. I cannot find talented and senior folks who fill the niche of my team (deep understanding of Linux systems, containers, and operating distributed systems). There seem to be a lot of SWEs in the world and very few SREs, let alone vanilla systems administrators for hire who are really good. I think as an industry everyone is pushed towards software engineering and the large clouds have vacuumed up everyone worth their weight for operations. We make it happen but it’s so stressful because our team and workload balance is so far out of whack.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Fordec 6y ago
      SREs get treated like a cost center and no career progression. The majority by volume of sysadmins were automated out by the wave of cloud vendors, leaving over a decade now of undertraining. Those who are left are mostly mission critical unfireable greybeards. SWE get to work on new products and get career growth towards bigger and more interesting projects as reward for delivery Of course people focus on where the opportunities are. It's not the fault of an individual company but an overall industry mindset. "Reward it or lose it" should be a mantra of availability in technical industry expertise.
      - chucky_z 6y ago
        It's really unfortunate. Cloud allows rapid iteration, but doing a bit of self-hosting/colocation is such an insane cost savings that I think a lot of folks are really missing out on. I know at least 1 startup I worked at that would've had a more comfortable runway had they not went wholesale into AWS instead of playing it smart with hybrid. Paying a small team of folks even an astronomical salary to keep a small number of servers up 24/7 and use cloud where it makes sense (S3, elastic CI/CD with EC2) should still be saving some companies 6+ figures a month.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      You train them, remember that? :D
  - gopalv 6y ago
    > no idea where you think all the talent was hiding until covid 19 The talent isn't being converted from potential - as was recently said, "You can't be what you can't see". I was in Kansas City meeting people in Jan and it's pretty clear that there's a lot of talent hiding out there in downtown Missouri. The talent there tops out at SSE because there's no vertical space without jumping to management & two years down the folks know are "mid-west-nice" managers with an iron fist behind it. Several people who should've chased down the principal engineer roles have become these sorts of managers who never made it to directors because they're always been better devs than they were managers. And this seemed twice as bad for the young uns to have a dev-heavy manager squash a few of their attempts to actually own decisions, instead of just proposing them & see that role as a way to get that ability. Most folks though things would be different if they had moved to SFBA, but all of them hit this point when they already had kids in school with stable single-income households (house all paid for). In fact, I'd be one of those people in Bangalore if I had a bit more skills as a manager (completely sucking at management is a good way to be forced to chase the dev side). If they could hired as a principal dev via remote out of being promising senior se, then this process would actually convert a lot of the talent into actual productivity in the industry.
    - ip26 6y ago
      To clarify, you're saying that limited career growth opportunity at satellite sites is stunting the talent development at that locale?
      - gopalv 6y ago
        Not satellite offices, I was specifically talking about employers who are entirely local. Yes, the strong incentive is to stay put, stick to the local employer as long as you can and still get a role that pays more money. The skills you get from sticking around just make it harder to shift as well sometimes. The output gets equated to talent - "built my sixteenth monolith .NET CRUD web app" is not as well respected as it should be. For example, there's folks in Portland who are looking at the Nike CEO situation with great trepidation - talented people who would do very well in a new job, assuming they don't need to move.
  - nph5667 6y ago
    From my own experience, it's just not a good time to change a job no matter how enticing it sounds.
    - Afton 6y ago
      I started a new job in April. Between when I interviewed and when I was started, offices shut down. It's been great. The fact that everyone is remote is actually a great 'leveler', since the company has a 'main office' and a few satellite offices in other cities. I'm not affiliated with the 'main office', but I actually am concerned that I'll suffer career-wise once the company goes back to in-office, since I'll be in a satellite office missing out on casual-but-important lunch/coffee/hallway conversations. So, from my perspective, it's a great time to change jobs. YMMV.
      - devilduck 6y ago
        I think it's a mistake to believe that being part of an office culture somehow makes you more valuable. You could still be quickly cut by a company focused on the bottom line.
      - nph5667 6y ago
        Sorry for not understanding, but I still don't quite get why is it a good time? From the description of your situation it looks like any new job right now is a temporal job. At least that's how I read it.
        Afton 6y ago
        I mean that everyone who wants to work remotely, now actually has the opportunity to do so, and since everyone is working remote, you are not at a disadvantage based on your remote status. That may change in the future, it may not. But right now, changing jobs doesn't seem like a 'bad time', which is what the parent poster was claiming.
        nph5667 6y ago
        Ah, I see. But I was trying to say that I do not want to change a job right now because of the global uncertainty, not that it is harder for me to do it.
  - coffee 6y ago
    The bigger problem that I've run into is that most employers don't know how to recognize talent.
  - theflyinghorse 6y ago
    It seems that wages are a lot lower in lower cost of living areas. So what makes it that a developer in SF is much more expansive than the one in, let's say, Chicago? Or let's flip it around, move the same developer from Chicago to SF and they will suddenly make more money. I can only imagine that cost of living is the main factor. Naturally there will be a tiny minority of truly brilliant builders and engineers, but we are not talking about them as they are outliers.
    - bluedino 6y ago
      >> So what makes it that a developer in SF is much more expansive than the one in, let's say, Chicago? One is more likely to have more experience with startups/trendy new tech. The other could probably work with it, but the other one already has.
  - kec 6y ago
    The same talent will be hired, they'll just be paid far less if they aren't in a HCOL area because they can be. Businesses don't want to pay more money than they have to and are ultimately in a much, much better position to play hardball than individual ICs, "rockstar" or no. The fact that some folks think so highly of themselves that they don't believe this to be true in their case is just hubris.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    Tech hiring is broken, more than likely they were right under your nose the whole time.
  - bcheung 6y ago
    I think for Ops / sysadmin work this is probably more true than general software engineering. Ops people tend to cluster in the bay area more. Probably because Ops work used to be more "physical hands" dealing with physical servers which requires being onsite.
- ericmay 6y ago
  I agree, mostly. The bottom is still decently high even in Midwest cities. But if you’re making $140,000 + RSU/Bonus/Etc., someone from somewhere else will do that job remotely for $100,000 easy. But I would characterize this as a wealth distribution, and overall net positive for the country. People who don’t have the opportunities to work at the top companies in the Bay Area or NYC or Boston now have better access. And the wages flow to those different areas.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    >> wealth distribution At the moment that may be true but increasing the pool of potential labor rarely results in wealth distribution. I think companies will pay less. That money won't go to other hires as tech companies limit hiring for other reasons than money. The money will go to bottom lines, to stockholders: the opposite of wealth distribution.
    - ericmay 6y ago
      A few thoughts: 1. Americans need to buy and hold equities. Period. When Google cuts costs or makes more money, I benefit as a shareholder (or you can hold total market indexes and the like). 2. Maybe the money will go to new hires, capabilities, expenditures, etc. ? 3. Sure, but this is certainly a good arguing point against immigration, population growth and H1-B visa programs and the like. 4. Increase taxes on the wealthy, etc. One arguing point I'd like to make though is that if this doesn't result in wealth redistribution (companies will pay less and this is fine) should we all begin moving to a few cities?
      - arcturus17 6y ago
        How much equity would you need to hold to compensate for a 30-40% decrease in wages?
        ericmay 6y ago
        Who is experiencing the decrease in wages? For many Americans the distribution of these jobs to other locations would result in an increase in wages. Not to mention, the top companies would still hire top talent in a competitive market.
- fxj 6y ago
  As an employer I am looking for an expert who does excellent work. I don't care where he is located and I am willing to pay good money for good work. Experts are a rare resource which will always be expensive no matter where they are located. My 2 ct.
  - thothamon 6y ago
    Agreed. Unless the long-term need for software begins to decline, if you are skilled, hard-working, and able to communicate and work well with others, a lot of people will hire you.
- ibarea23 6y ago
  It will just continue to bifurcate more. Highly skilled people will still kill. People that mostly benefitted from being in the Bay are fucked. High-end positions outside the Bay pay Bay salaries.
- nph5667 6y ago
  You are spot on and I am surprised that this is often overlooked. The industry is either on the the track to the massive shift how it operates, or, after COVID it comes back to the traditional in office MO.
  - trentnix 6y ago
    I'm not sure it's relevant. It's not as if remote options haven't been available for a long time. The wages in San Francisco aren't determined explicitly by cost-of-living, they are determined by the scarcity of availability of the right resources. Businesses found it necessary to exist in Silicon Valley because it provided certain benefits, and businesses found it necessary to have on-premises employees because it provided certain benefits. Since California won't allow any on-premises anything, the cost-benefit of being in the Valley and having people in the office is being reset. But if your skills and aptitude are scarce, there's no reason to believe wages won't continue to reflect that. And if your skills and aptitude aren't scarce, you were overpaid in the first place.
    - throwaway201103 6y ago
      The support for remote has expanded greatly. Zoom isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than a group of people sitting around a speakerphone or a glitchy skype or WebX call trying to work with a remote person. And if everyone was remote, forget about it it was like getting the planets to align for everyone to be in productive remote communication. Remember spending the first 15 minutes of every conference call just getting everyone online and tech issues settled?
      - trentnix 6y ago
        True story, but I feel like that's the fairly distant (in Internet years) past. I just know that the improved state of affairs has my wife and I dreaming of remote work in a rural area one day soon. Come on Starlink!
    - nph5667 6y ago
      I agree, and frankly, at this point, I think the changes did not pass the point of no return. But this depends on whether the vaccines eventually work and for how long, will the virus mutates etc. What I know is that never before the industry had this global "remote operation" training on such a global scale and who knows will it result in changes or it was decided that it's unsustainable and everyone wants to be back to normal asap.
- coffee 6y ago
  > They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages. This isn't new, it's already been realized long ago. I've been working remote for ~10 years and there is always a location modifier in the salary.
- scelerat 6y ago
  The SF-based company I work for has already announced wage adjustments for employees who relocate out of the region. They haven't happened yet, but the company has given everyone a "heads up; it's on the table."
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Would be odd to expect otherwise. In general, companies are going to pay market rate a.k.a. what they must to attract talent. Someone who has a much lower cost of living may be willing to accept much lower compensation to work for the same company. If you expect the company to continue paying you that much despite a change in your situation you're doomed to disappointment.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    My company of about 4000 people ran the numbers after the dust settled from transitioning to remote work, and determined that we're about 30% less productive. This was deemed acceptable, and we've been hiring to close that gap. It would not surprise me at all if companies became more open to hiring remote employees, but started paying them 20% - 30% less, and extended the offer to transition to WFH (with a salary adjustment) for existing employees as well.
  - xtat 6y ago
    I've worked for several and relocated, nobody ever tried this. I can't imagine a company being so attractive that it would make sense to stay in such a role under the circumstances.
- baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  Having had a fairly long tech career working in small, non-SF cities, even getting paid 70-80% of a Bay area salary, I can tell you that this allows you to live very, very well. Bay area salaries are much larger than most other jobs (tech or not) in small cities. I recall local tech companies offering 1/2 to 1/3 of what you would get paid for average (non-FAANG) work in the Bay. In most smaller cities in the US > $100k is still quite a lot for a household, let alone a single income. If take that income outside of even small towns to more rural areas, $100k can allow you to live very, very well. Sure eventually we'll see salaries reach an equilibrium, where local tech companies have to offer more and big tech companies will offer less. However, for the next few years, if you're coming from a Bay Area company, you can take a pretty major cut to TC and still live extremely well. You don't have to move to the middle of nowhere for this to be the case either.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    Depends on how much you value housing size / quality. You can't get a big house in the Bay Area but if you opt for something smaller you get a lot more disposable income to spend on other luxuries.
    - giantrobot 6y ago
      Uh...not really. Tiny piece of shit houses built in the 60s still go for a million plus in much of the SFBA. The problem is there's a real housing shortage so there's untenable minimum prices for houses. At a million dollars you need a fairly large household income to afford luxuries beyond your house. Even putting down 25% on the house with a good 30 year fixed rate loan you'd be looking at just under $4k a month for your mortgage. After utilities you're easily over $4k a month. If you scrimped you could maybe keep your other household costs under $500 a month (realistically you're looking at $1k). So you're looking at a take-home of $4.5-5k to just stay afloat. That's all for a shitty house that needs work, doesn't have great insulation, and doesn't have a lot of usable space. If you're 30 when you buy they place you only have to keep that income until you're 60 or hope that you build a ton of equity in the meantime and cash out. That's the minimum for most of the SFBA. There's plenty of places with even more outrageous prices for shitty houses. To buy a house for not completely outrageous prices you need to go pretty far afield with hour plus commutes. Treating yourself to ramen once a week is not a luxury.
- sjg007 6y ago
  I doubt it, software is eating the world, there aren't enough engineers and we see productivity gains like the cloud where you can basically run a global scale business with just a handful of people. We will probably see more of those companies than less.
  - foolfoolz 6y ago
    when the work is remote we don’t need remote-california to save 10% on wages. we will go to remote-ukraine or estonia and hire twice as many engineers
    - thothamon 6y ago
      And then you would be committing the classic blunder. Putting more engineers on a late project makes it later.
    - freyir 6y ago
      Companies could already outsource their development to Estonia or Ukraine (and done do) but there are many hidden costs to this.
    - sjg007 6y ago
      They already do!! Still not enough engineers.
    - jimbokun 6y ago
      You are really late to this party, this has been happening since the late 90s.
    - giantrobot 6y ago
      As talented as the Ukrainian or Estonian engineers might be you're unlikely to see any real savings over time. Just scheduling things a full work day apart in time zones is really difficult. Effectively communicating is even more difficult. Then there's stupid little shit like one machine in a remote office set to a different locale than the main office that breaks things in stupid ways. Engineering throughput definitely doesn't scale linearly with the size of the engineering team. Good on you for never having managed to have heard of Fred Brooks though.
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  > employers also realize they can have employees work from home. I think it's even worse than that. Once they realize that you're working from home, why wouldn't they hire someone much cheaper abroad? I hope I'm wrong but I think in less than 5 years people will regret this WFH thing.
  - txsoftwaredev 6y ago
    If this was an option they would have already outsourced the work.
    - ericd 6y ago
      It becomes a lot easier as an office becomes remote-first, and adopts the changes necessary to make that work well. There's no longer that barrier between the in-person and remote teams.
    - Zenbit_UX 6y ago
      It is an option and they will, it will start slowly though. First offering a job to someone out of state. Maybe they save some money and the next hire, they look à little further and they pick up an employee from another English speaking country, they save even more salary. The more these tests work out the more companies will expirement. Eventually hiring an American will seem unnecessary and costly if you're distributed anyways. It's great news for non-Americans though, USD goes a long way in a lot of the world.
      - majormajor 6y ago
        Last time I was at a company that tried that, the (US-based) management would fight over making sure their projects went to the US-based devs (even if not in the same office) vs the overseas devs because the communication gap - timezones and physical distance both - was that bad. Zoom hasn't fixed this.
  - freyir 6y ago
    They’ve tried countless times for the last 30+ years. It has not ended well. Maybe this time is different with the advent of better online collaboration tools. But these tools do little to help with real-time communication across time zones and language barriers.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  I've seen a lot of predictions for "races for the bottom" over the years, and yet it's hard to remember one that actually happened. Economies usually don't work like that. Even if some version of that happens, it will still pay off to move out of SF. I think one of the big problems in the US is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich coastal cities, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the country is relatively impoverished. If that ends up being spread around more evenly, I think that's only good. Even if I personally might get a pay cut.
  - throwaway1777 6y ago
    Economic growth would come from bringing other areas up, not dragging the coasts down.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    >I think one of the big problems in the US is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich coastal cities, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the country is relatively impoverished. This statement can be generalized to: "I think one of the big problems in the world is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich countries, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the world are relatively impoverished."
    - balfirevic 6y ago
      It's worse when you generalize it to countries, because "can't afford to move" becomes "is not allowed by law to move".
  - geodel 6y ago
    It has already happened for manufacturing. Now US still is home to lot of high end manufacturing. But the point it no longer offers middle class living to millions of Americans. Now I do understand that of software people believe that programing is somehow special and can't be done in effective manner remotely or third world site at far lower cost. I have few observations here: 1) With massive proliferation of frameworks the creative/ intellectual input is increasing minimal for most of commercial work. And that's where most of the software devs are employed. 2) A lot of work is low quality that companies do not care because same mentality of cheap use and throw stuff is prevailing now for enterprise apps as it is for consumer stuff. 3) Looking at lot of software produced by top valley companies is buggy, bloated and feels generally crappy. I do not believe all of it is just due to companies' strategy of being first to market. A lot of it seems because of same low quality CRUD peddlers who fill office floors of fortune 500 companies.
- vl 6y ago
  >They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages. The reason they pay “SF wages” is because they can’t hire talent at other prices, not because of some goodness of the heart. While total talent pool might be slightly expanded with people who didn’t want to move to SF previously, overall it’s not going to be a big shift.
  - three_seagrass 6y ago
    For talent that needs to come to live and work in the Bay Area. Remove that need, suddenly wages are normalized for the area the talent lives in.
- chris11 6y ago
  Yeah, that's my concern. It would be different if I was wanting to buy a house. I actually like my apartment in the bay area, but when the office did shut down I looked at what it would cost. I wouldn't save much money because I wanted to stay in California. My employer is becoming more WFH friendly. But they are explicitly saying post-covid fulltime remote will require an adjustment for base salary and future equity grants. I don't think that would be a good financial decision for me. Even if my compensation didn't get cut I would probably end up needing to take a pay cut or move if I wanted to change jobs.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >require an adjustment for base salary and future equity grants Base salaries are pretty sticky downwards. It wouldn't be surprising to see modest formal geo-based adjustments of base salaries and much larger quiet adjustments of equity grants--which tend to be much less transparent. It will obviously vary by company but, to the degree in-office becomes largely optional, it's reasonable to expect comp tends towards something more equalized--at least within the US.
- dustingetz 6y ago
  .
  - throwaway1777 6y ago
    Ludicrous comment. The US has many fabulous university CS programs.
  - bcheung 6y ago
    Most CS graduates and interns I have hired and worked with I have been pretty happy with. Granted I'm disappointed CS is turning more into programming as a craft and less on the mathematical thinking necessary for true innovation to happen, but from an economics perspective it makes sense to hire programmers over theoreticians.
  - NonEUCitizen 6y ago
    There are many immigrants in US getting paid US wages who graduated from non-US colleges. Companies in other countries need to start paying US wages and stop exploiting developers.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  Maybe not entirely - those SF-area in demand jobs will hopefully demand their current or near-current wages. The company valued their work at pay $x. If only there was some kind of organization in which tech workers could "unify".
- iEchoic 6y ago
  > They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages . . . I predict a race for the bottom. Remote companies that attempt to race for the bottom will be at a huge competitive disadvantage against remote companies that don't. Over time, they'll learn and adapt (or they'll die). The biggest misconception about remote work is that remote work is good because don't have to pay bay area salaries. When you do that, you're broadening your talent pool, and you're then limiting yourself to the bottom half of it. When you pay Silicon Valley salaries (or higher) for remote work, you broaden your talent pool to the entire world, and then you get to select from the very top tier. We've been doing this for years, now, and it still feels like an undiscovered gold mine hiding in plain sight.
- xtat 6y ago
  If that is truly the result then I what comes from this will be a lot more young companies and competition at the startup level- if you can't pull in a reasonable tech salary why bother making someone else rich?
ghaff 6y ago
There's a lot to like about many areas of California. Which ones may depend on your weather, cultural, etc. preferences. But Silicon Valley proper I find not particularly appealing; housing costs are only part of the reason. (SF itself has well-documented pluses and minuses.) I don't live or work in CA/SV. But if I were in SV but no longer needed to commute, I might well stay in CA but I'd probably move somewhere outside of SV commuting distance.
- pvarangot 6y ago
  I think SVs appeal is that you can leave in a quiet suburb close to a lot of easily accessible nature, while still having Amazon 2-day shipping, ridesharing, Uber Eats, and luxury retail. There's not many places in the US like this. Europe has a lot but there's not much tech jobs in them. You are also close to SF if you like the madness of the city every once in a while. Other suburby places with nature easily accessible usually have a more spartan retail experience and sometimes the mail/Amazon doesn't work so well.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    A lot depends on what the nature you're looking to be accessible to looks like of course. (And I'll be the first to agree that the Bay Area is probably especially nice in this regard.) But I'd say you were describing any significant coastal city, areas of Colorado (can't speak to other mountain states although places like Boise I would think...), etc. If you're looking for a reasonably affluent suburb there really isn't a particular shortage of them around the country--and many have good outdoor recreation options.
  - munificent 6y ago
    > a quiet suburb close to a lot of easily accessible nature, while still having Amazon 2-day shipping, ridesharing, Uber Eats, and luxury retail. Maybe I'm missing, but I don't see anything in that list that isn't true of almost every metro area in the US. I think people living in SF notice when new services come out that are only available there, like Uber was at first. But they don't notice when those services later spread to the rest of the country. You can get Amazon Prime shipping and rideshares everywhere now. Other cities may have somewhat less luxury retail, but likely have shorter drives with less traffic to get to nature.
justinzollars 6y ago
Where are you going?
- bigyikes 6y ago
  ATX, baby!
  - justinzollars 6y ago
    Congratulations!
kilbuz 6y ago
Always have to ask, where are you moving and why did you pick it?
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  I always answer: fuck off; we're full. California, particularly Bay Area California is so ridiculously dysfunctional, the last thing any region needs is their refugees, who will bring with them the problems they're fleeing. Austin for example. Used to be a great place.
  - camjohnson26 6y ago
    That’s a ridiculous take. There’s a lot of technical talent trapped in the Bay Area and I welcome it in my region. Treating every resident as if they agree with the repressive SF politics is over generalizing. And who’s full? The main thing the flyover states need is more people.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      An influx of coastal refugees has driven real estate up and out of reach of many locals where I'm from. Those are the types of places that are "full", even with loads of building.
      - camjohnson26 6y ago
        You can buy a home cheap in Detroit, that’s not a good thing. Wouldn’t rising home values signal economic growth? As long as there’s room to expand I don’t see the problem. SF’s issue isn’t high prices, it’s archaic zoning laws that limit supply to keep prices high for home owners.
        ummonk 6y ago
        I think there are two issues here. First, housing is somewhat inelastic in that it takes multiple years to respond to a rise in demand and plan out and build new housing even with a reasonably fast permitting / approval process. Second, due to labor and materials costs, the price of housing in many areas is far below the cost to build new housing so housing prices will necessarily go up even with maximum build rates. This can create affordability difficulties for the lower rungs of income.
grillvogel 6y ago
what happens if everyone goes back to the office in a year and now you're the only remote employee?
- sudo-i 6y ago
  Yes, this is what I worry about too. I've been hearing remote work is the future for many years now, but haven't seen much movement toward the goal. Now, we are in a pandemic and everyone is forced to be at home, not by choice, but by necessity. Everyone is still saying remote work is now accelerated, but no one had a choice if they wanted to work remotely or not... Of course there will be some increase in remote working after the pandemic, but I think the vast majority is going to return to the office. Not because they can't work from home, but just because they don't want to work from home.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  Agreed, people are way overestimating the impact of this. Most people I know can't wait for life to go back to normal. It's easy to move away when everyone is forced to. But when you need that new promotion when office life is back and someone else there is networking...you just gonna stay back in Tulsa? Doubtful.
- boringg 6y ago
  This is indeed what will likely happen given how many people actually don't love working full time remote. So all these media stories will swing the other way afterwards. Also way easier to cut people when you don't have to see them in the office every day.
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seppin 6y ago
> There just aren’t good reasons to live here anymore for so many of us The majority of people that say this are also the exact reason why the city is blackhole of culture and fun. You aren't in traffic, you are the traffic.
colechristensen 6y ago
I am likewise on my way out the door, not quite to the giving notice stage but not far either.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> and still come out ahead financially. Ya. Earning a SF wage but living elsewhere is great. But there is a flip side to this coin. As employees realize they can work from home, employers also realize they can have employees work from home. They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages. Those who convert their in-office jobs into work-from-home are a covid oddity. Those who will be hired in the future on the assumption that they will always work remotely will likely face much lower wages. I predict a race for the bottom.

birdyrooster 6y ago
We’ve been trying to hire these people for ages locally and remotely and we still couldn’t find them so I have no idea where you think all the talent was hiding until covid 19.
- etimberg 6y ago
  A lot of people, myself included, have been quite hesitant to work remotely until now. I've been pleasantly surprised how well it's gone and would consider a remote position in the future but I think it'd have to be a fully remote team. When offices do return, being one of a few remote workers means you will likely be left out of a lot of teambuilding, conversations, etc.
  - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    Every team I've been on since 2015 has been distributed, even when my job is "onsite". Sometimes we're in multiple offices, or we have people in the office & people working from home, but the net effect is almost no one can count on going to an office and only working w/ people in the same physical office. We're all largely working remotely anyway, but we're just not being honest about it.
  - harikb 6y ago
    This may be the biggest societal contribution from the pandemic, if and when we survive it
- chucky_z 6y ago
  I agree with this. I cannot find talented and senior folks who fill the niche of my team (deep understanding of Linux systems, containers, and operating distributed systems). There seem to be a lot of SWEs in the world and very few SREs, let alone vanilla systems administrators for hire who are really good. I think as an industry everyone is pushed towards software engineering and the large clouds have vacuumed up everyone worth their weight for operations. We make it happen but it’s so stressful because our team and workload balance is so far out of whack.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Fordec 6y ago
    SREs get treated like a cost center and no career progression. The majority by volume of sysadmins were automated out by the wave of cloud vendors, leaving over a decade now of undertraining. Those who are left are mostly mission critical unfireable greybeards. SWE get to work on new products and get career growth towards bigger and more interesting projects as reward for delivery Of course people focus on where the opportunities are. It's not the fault of an individual company but an overall industry mindset. "Reward it or lose it" should be a mantra of availability in technical industry expertise.
    - chucky_z 6y ago
      It's really unfortunate. Cloud allows rapid iteration, but doing a bit of self-hosting/colocation is such an insane cost savings that I think a lot of folks are really missing out on. I know at least 1 startup I worked at that would've had a more comfortable runway had they not went wholesale into AWS instead of playing it smart with hybrid. Paying a small team of folks even an astronomical salary to keep a small number of servers up 24/7 and use cloud where it makes sense (S3, elastic CI/CD with EC2) should still be saving some companies 6+ figures a month.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    You train them, remember that? :D
- gopalv 6y ago
  > no idea where you think all the talent was hiding until covid 19 The talent isn't being converted from potential - as was recently said, "You can't be what you can't see". I was in Kansas City meeting people in Jan and it's pretty clear that there's a lot of talent hiding out there in downtown Missouri. The talent there tops out at SSE because there's no vertical space without jumping to management & two years down the folks know are "mid-west-nice" managers with an iron fist behind it. Several people who should've chased down the principal engineer roles have become these sorts of managers who never made it to directors because they're always been better devs than they were managers. And this seemed twice as bad for the young uns to have a dev-heavy manager squash a few of their attempts to actually own decisions, instead of just proposing them & see that role as a way to get that ability. Most folks though things would be different if they had moved to SFBA, but all of them hit this point when they already had kids in school with stable single-income households (house all paid for). In fact, I'd be one of those people in Bangalore if I had a bit more skills as a manager (completely sucking at management is a good way to be forced to chase the dev side). If they could hired as a principal dev via remote out of being promising senior se, then this process would actually convert a lot of the talent into actual productivity in the industry.
  - ip26 6y ago
    To clarify, you're saying that limited career growth opportunity at satellite sites is stunting the talent development at that locale?
    - gopalv 6y ago
      Not satellite offices, I was specifically talking about employers who are entirely local. Yes, the strong incentive is to stay put, stick to the local employer as long as you can and still get a role that pays more money. The skills you get from sticking around just make it harder to shift as well sometimes. The output gets equated to talent - "built my sixteenth monolith .NET CRUD web app" is not as well respected as it should be. For example, there's folks in Portland who are looking at the Nike CEO situation with great trepidation - talented people who would do very well in a new job, assuming they don't need to move.
- nph5667 6y ago
  From my own experience, it's just not a good time to change a job no matter how enticing it sounds.
  - Afton 6y ago
    I started a new job in April. Between when I interviewed and when I was started, offices shut down. It's been great. The fact that everyone is remote is actually a great 'leveler', since the company has a 'main office' and a few satellite offices in other cities. I'm not affiliated with the 'main office', but I actually am concerned that I'll suffer career-wise once the company goes back to in-office, since I'll be in a satellite office missing out on casual-but-important lunch/coffee/hallway conversations. So, from my perspective, it's a great time to change jobs. YMMV.
    - devilduck 6y ago
      I think it's a mistake to believe that being part of an office culture somehow makes you more valuable. You could still be quickly cut by a company focused on the bottom line.
    - nph5667 6y ago
      Sorry for not understanding, but I still don't quite get why is it a good time? From the description of your situation it looks like any new job right now is a temporal job. At least that's how I read it.
      - Afton 6y ago
        I mean that everyone who wants to work remotely, now actually has the opportunity to do so, and since everyone is working remote, you are not at a disadvantage based on your remote status. That may change in the future, it may not. But right now, changing jobs doesn't seem like a 'bad time', which is what the parent poster was claiming.
        nph5667 6y ago
        Ah, I see. But I was trying to say that I do not want to change a job right now because of the global uncertainty, not that it is harder for me to do it.
- coffee 6y ago
  The bigger problem that I've run into is that most employers don't know how to recognize talent.
- theflyinghorse 6y ago
  It seems that wages are a lot lower in lower cost of living areas. So what makes it that a developer in SF is much more expansive than the one in, let's say, Chicago? Or let's flip it around, move the same developer from Chicago to SF and they will suddenly make more money. I can only imagine that cost of living is the main factor. Naturally there will be a tiny minority of truly brilliant builders and engineers, but we are not talking about them as they are outliers.
  - bluedino 6y ago
    >> So what makes it that a developer in SF is much more expansive than the one in, let's say, Chicago? One is more likely to have more experience with startups/trendy new tech. The other could probably work with it, but the other one already has.
- kec 6y ago
  The same talent will be hired, they'll just be paid far less if they aren't in a HCOL area because they can be. Businesses don't want to pay more money than they have to and are ultimately in a much, much better position to play hardball than individual ICs, "rockstar" or no. The fact that some folks think so highly of themselves that they don't believe this to be true in their case is just hubris.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Tech hiring is broken, more than likely they were right under your nose the whole time.
- bcheung 6y ago
  I think for Ops / sysadmin work this is probably more true than general software engineering. Ops people tend to cluster in the bay area more. Probably because Ops work used to be more "physical hands" dealing with physical servers which requires being onsite.
ericmay 6y ago
I agree, mostly. The bottom is still decently high even in Midwest cities. But if you’re making $140,000 + RSU/Bonus/Etc., someone from somewhere else will do that job remotely for $100,000 easy. But I would characterize this as a wealth distribution, and overall net positive for the country. People who don’t have the opportunities to work at the top companies in the Bay Area or NYC or Boston now have better access. And the wages flow to those different areas.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> wealth distribution At the moment that may be true but increasing the pool of potential labor rarely results in wealth distribution. I think companies will pay less. That money won't go to other hires as tech companies limit hiring for other reasons than money. The money will go to bottom lines, to stockholders: the opposite of wealth distribution.
  - ericmay 6y ago
    A few thoughts: 1. Americans need to buy and hold equities. Period. When Google cuts costs or makes more money, I benefit as a shareholder (or you can hold total market indexes and the like). 2. Maybe the money will go to new hires, capabilities, expenditures, etc. ? 3. Sure, but this is certainly a good arguing point against immigration, population growth and H1-B visa programs and the like. 4. Increase taxes on the wealthy, etc. One arguing point I'd like to make though is that if this doesn't result in wealth redistribution (companies will pay less and this is fine) should we all begin moving to a few cities?
    - arcturus17 6y ago
      How much equity would you need to hold to compensate for a 30-40% decrease in wages?
      - ericmay 6y ago
        Who is experiencing the decrease in wages? For many Americans the distribution of these jobs to other locations would result in an increase in wages. Not to mention, the top companies would still hire top talent in a competitive market.
fxj 6y ago
As an employer I am looking for an expert who does excellent work. I don't care where he is located and I am willing to pay good money for good work. Experts are a rare resource which will always be expensive no matter where they are located. My 2 ct.
- thothamon 6y ago
  Agreed. Unless the long-term need for software begins to decline, if you are skilled, hard-working, and able to communicate and work well with others, a lot of people will hire you.
ibarea23 6y ago
It will just continue to bifurcate more. Highly skilled people will still kill. People that mostly benefitted from being in the Bay are fucked. High-end positions outside the Bay pay Bay salaries.
nph5667 6y ago
You are spot on and I am surprised that this is often overlooked. The industry is either on the the track to the massive shift how it operates, or, after COVID it comes back to the traditional in office MO.
- trentnix 6y ago
  I'm not sure it's relevant. It's not as if remote options haven't been available for a long time. The wages in San Francisco aren't determined explicitly by cost-of-living, they are determined by the scarcity of availability of the right resources. Businesses found it necessary to exist in Silicon Valley because it provided certain benefits, and businesses found it necessary to have on-premises employees because it provided certain benefits. Since California won't allow any on-premises anything, the cost-benefit of being in the Valley and having people in the office is being reset. But if your skills and aptitude are scarce, there's no reason to believe wages won't continue to reflect that. And if your skills and aptitude aren't scarce, you were overpaid in the first place.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    The support for remote has expanded greatly. Zoom isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than a group of people sitting around a speakerphone or a glitchy skype or WebX call trying to work with a remote person. And if everyone was remote, forget about it it was like getting the planets to align for everyone to be in productive remote communication. Remember spending the first 15 minutes of every conference call just getting everyone online and tech issues settled?
    - trentnix 6y ago
      True story, but I feel like that's the fairly distant (in Internet years) past. I just know that the improved state of affairs has my wife and I dreaming of remote work in a rural area one day soon. Come on Starlink!
  - nph5667 6y ago
    I agree, and frankly, at this point, I think the changes did not pass the point of no return. But this depends on whether the vaccines eventually work and for how long, will the virus mutates etc. What I know is that never before the industry had this global "remote operation" training on such a global scale and who knows will it result in changes or it was decided that it's unsustainable and everyone wants to be back to normal asap.
coffee 6y ago
> They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages. This isn't new, it's already been realized long ago. I've been working remote for ~10 years and there is always a location modifier in the salary.
scelerat 6y ago
The SF-based company I work for has already announced wage adjustments for employees who relocate out of the region. They haven't happened yet, but the company has given everyone a "heads up; it's on the table."
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Would be odd to expect otherwise. In general, companies are going to pay market rate a.k.a. what they must to attract talent. Someone who has a much lower cost of living may be willing to accept much lower compensation to work for the same company. If you expect the company to continue paying you that much despite a change in your situation you're doomed to disappointment.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  My company of about 4000 people ran the numbers after the dust settled from transitioning to remote work, and determined that we're about 30% less productive. This was deemed acceptable, and we've been hiring to close that gap. It would not surprise me at all if companies became more open to hiring remote employees, but started paying them 20% - 30% less, and extended the offer to transition to WFH (with a salary adjustment) for existing employees as well.
- xtat 6y ago
  I've worked for several and relocated, nobody ever tried this. I can't imagine a company being so attractive that it would make sense to stay in such a role under the circumstances.
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
Having had a fairly long tech career working in small, non-SF cities, even getting paid 70-80% of a Bay area salary, I can tell you that this allows you to live very, very well. Bay area salaries are much larger than most other jobs (tech or not) in small cities. I recall local tech companies offering 1/2 to 1/3 of what you would get paid for average (non-FAANG) work in the Bay. In most smaller cities in the US > $100k is still quite a lot for a household, let alone a single income. If take that income outside of even small towns to more rural areas, $100k can allow you to live very, very well. Sure eventually we'll see salaries reach an equilibrium, where local tech companies have to offer more and big tech companies will offer less. However, for the next few years, if you're coming from a Bay Area company, you can take a pretty major cut to TC and still live extremely well. You don't have to move to the middle of nowhere for this to be the case either.
- ummonk 6y ago
  Depends on how much you value housing size / quality. You can't get a big house in the Bay Area but if you opt for something smaller you get a lot more disposable income to spend on other luxuries.
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    Uh...not really. Tiny piece of shit houses built in the 60s still go for a million plus in much of the SFBA. The problem is there's a real housing shortage so there's untenable minimum prices for houses. At a million dollars you need a fairly large household income to afford luxuries beyond your house. Even putting down 25% on the house with a good 30 year fixed rate loan you'd be looking at just under $4k a month for your mortgage. After utilities you're easily over $4k a month. If you scrimped you could maybe keep your other household costs under $500 a month (realistically you're looking at $1k). So you're looking at a take-home of $4.5-5k to just stay afloat. That's all for a shitty house that needs work, doesn't have great insulation, and doesn't have a lot of usable space. If you're 30 when you buy they place you only have to keep that income until you're 60 or hope that you build a ton of equity in the meantime and cash out. That's the minimum for most of the SFBA. There's plenty of places with even more outrageous prices for shitty houses. To buy a house for not completely outrageous prices you need to go pretty far afield with hour plus commutes. Treating yourself to ramen once a week is not a luxury.
sjg007 6y ago
I doubt it, software is eating the world, there aren't enough engineers and we see productivity gains like the cloud where you can basically run a global scale business with just a handful of people. We will probably see more of those companies than less.
- foolfoolz 6y ago
  when the work is remote we don’t need remote-california to save 10% on wages. we will go to remote-ukraine or estonia and hire twice as many engineers
  - thothamon 6y ago
    And then you would be committing the classic blunder. Putting more engineers on a late project makes it later.
  - freyir 6y ago
    Companies could already outsource their development to Estonia or Ukraine (and done do) but there are many hidden costs to this.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    They already do!! Still not enough engineers.
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    You are really late to this party, this has been happening since the late 90s.
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    As talented as the Ukrainian or Estonian engineers might be you're unlikely to see any real savings over time. Just scheduling things a full work day apart in time zones is really difficult. Effectively communicating is even more difficult. Then there's stupid little shit like one machine in a remote office set to a different locale than the main office that breaks things in stupid ways. Engineering throughput definitely doesn't scale linearly with the size of the engineering team. Good on you for never having managed to have heard of Fred Brooks though.
jmnicolas 6y ago
> employers also realize they can have employees work from home. I think it's even worse than that. Once they realize that you're working from home, why wouldn't they hire someone much cheaper abroad? I hope I'm wrong but I think in less than 5 years people will regret this WFH thing.
- txsoftwaredev 6y ago
  If this was an option they would have already outsourced the work.
  - ericd 6y ago
    It becomes a lot easier as an office becomes remote-first, and adopts the changes necessary to make that work well. There's no longer that barrier between the in-person and remote teams.
  - Zenbit_UX 6y ago
    It is an option and they will, it will start slowly though. First offering a job to someone out of state. Maybe they save some money and the next hire, they look à little further and they pick up an employee from another English speaking country, they save even more salary. The more these tests work out the more companies will expirement. Eventually hiring an American will seem unnecessary and costly if you're distributed anyways. It's great news for non-Americans though, USD goes a long way in a lot of the world.
    - majormajor 6y ago
      Last time I was at a company that tried that, the (US-based) management would fight over making sure their projects went to the US-based devs (even if not in the same office) vs the overseas devs because the communication gap - timezones and physical distance both - was that bad. Zoom hasn't fixed this.
- freyir 6y ago
  They’ve tried countless times for the last 30+ years. It has not ended well. Maybe this time is different with the advent of better online collaboration tools. But these tools do little to help with real-time communication across time zones and language barriers.
BurningFrog 6y ago
I've seen a lot of predictions for "races for the bottom" over the years, and yet it's hard to remember one that actually happened. Economies usually don't work like that. Even if some version of that happens, it will still pay off to move out of SF. I think one of the big problems in the US is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich coastal cities, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the country is relatively impoverished. If that ends up being spread around more evenly, I think that's only good. Even if I personally might get a pay cut.
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  Economic growth would come from bringing other areas up, not dragging the coasts down.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >I think one of the big problems in the US is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich coastal cities, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the country is relatively impoverished. This statement can be generalized to: "I think one of the big problems in the world is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich countries, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the world are relatively impoverished."
  - balfirevic 6y ago
    It's worse when you generalize it to countries, because "can't afford to move" becomes "is not allowed by law to move".
- geodel 6y ago
  It has already happened for manufacturing. Now US still is home to lot of high end manufacturing. But the point it no longer offers middle class living to millions of Americans. Now I do understand that of software people believe that programing is somehow special and can't be done in effective manner remotely or third world site at far lower cost. I have few observations here: 1) With massive proliferation of frameworks the creative/ intellectual input is increasing minimal for most of commercial work. And that's where most of the software devs are employed. 2) A lot of work is low quality that companies do not care because same mentality of cheap use and throw stuff is prevailing now for enterprise apps as it is for consumer stuff. 3) Looking at lot of software produced by top valley companies is buggy, bloated and feels generally crappy. I do not believe all of it is just due to companies' strategy of being first to market. A lot of it seems because of same low quality CRUD peddlers who fill office floors of fortune 500 companies.
vl 6y ago
>They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages. The reason they pay “SF wages” is because they can’t hire talent at other prices, not because of some goodness of the heart. While total talent pool might be slightly expanded with people who didn’t want to move to SF previously, overall it’s not going to be a big shift.
- three_seagrass 6y ago
  For talent that needs to come to live and work in the Bay Area. Remove that need, suddenly wages are normalized for the area the talent lives in.
chris11 6y ago
Yeah, that's my concern. It would be different if I was wanting to buy a house. I actually like my apartment in the bay area, but when the office did shut down I looked at what it would cost. I wouldn't save much money because I wanted to stay in California. My employer is becoming more WFH friendly. But they are explicitly saying post-covid fulltime remote will require an adjustment for base salary and future equity grants. I don't think that would be a good financial decision for me. Even if my compensation didn't get cut I would probably end up needing to take a pay cut or move if I wanted to change jobs.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >require an adjustment for base salary and future equity grants Base salaries are pretty sticky downwards. It wouldn't be surprising to see modest formal geo-based adjustments of base salaries and much larger quiet adjustments of equity grants--which tend to be much less transparent. It will obviously vary by company but, to the degree in-office becomes largely optional, it's reasonable to expect comp tends towards something more equalized--at least within the US.
dustingetz 6y ago
.
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  Ludicrous comment. The US has many fabulous university CS programs.
- bcheung 6y ago
  Most CS graduates and interns I have hired and worked with I have been pretty happy with. Granted I'm disappointed CS is turning more into programming as a craft and less on the mathematical thinking necessary for true innovation to happen, but from an economics perspective it makes sense to hire programmers over theoreticians.
- NonEUCitizen 6y ago
  There are many immigrants in US getting paid US wages who graduated from non-US colleges. Companies in other countries need to start paying US wages and stop exploiting developers.
unethical_ban 6y ago
Maybe not entirely - those SF-area in demand jobs will hopefully demand their current or near-current wages. The company valued their work at pay $x. If only there was some kind of organization in which tech workers could "unify".
iEchoic 6y ago
> They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages . . . I predict a race for the bottom. Remote companies that attempt to race for the bottom will be at a huge competitive disadvantage against remote companies that don't. Over time, they'll learn and adapt (or they'll die). The biggest misconception about remote work is that remote work is good because don't have to pay bay area salaries. When you do that, you're broadening your talent pool, and you're then limiting yourself to the bottom half of it. When you pay Silicon Valley salaries (or higher) for remote work, you broaden your talent pool to the entire world, and then you get to select from the very top tier. We've been doing this for years, now, and it still feels like an undiscovered gold mine hiding in plain sight.
xtat 6y ago
If that is truly the result then I what comes from this will be a lot more young companies and competition at the startup level- if you can't pull in a reasonable tech salary why bother making someone else rich?

ghaff 6y ago

There's a lot to like about many areas of California. Which ones may depend on your weather, cultural, etc. preferences. But Silicon Valley proper I find not particularly appealing; housing costs are only part of the reason. (SF itself has well-documented pluses and minuses.) I don't live or work in CA/SV. But if I were in SV but no longer needed to commute, I might well stay in CA but I'd probably move somewhere outside of SV commuting distance.

pvarangot 6y ago
I think SVs appeal is that you can leave in a quiet suburb close to a lot of easily accessible nature, while still having Amazon 2-day shipping, ridesharing, Uber Eats, and luxury retail. There's not many places in the US like this. Europe has a lot but there's not much tech jobs in them. You are also close to SF if you like the madness of the city every once in a while. Other suburby places with nature easily accessible usually have a more spartan retail experience and sometimes the mail/Amazon doesn't work so well.
- ghaff 6y ago
  A lot depends on what the nature you're looking to be accessible to looks like of course. (And I'll be the first to agree that the Bay Area is probably especially nice in this regard.) But I'd say you were describing any significant coastal city, areas of Colorado (can't speak to other mountain states although places like Boise I would think...), etc. If you're looking for a reasonably affluent suburb there really isn't a particular shortage of them around the country--and many have good outdoor recreation options.
- munificent 6y ago
  > a quiet suburb close to a lot of easily accessible nature, while still having Amazon 2-day shipping, ridesharing, Uber Eats, and luxury retail. Maybe I'm missing, but I don't see anything in that list that isn't true of almost every metro area in the US. I think people living in SF notice when new services come out that are only available there, like Uber was at first. But they don't notice when those services later spread to the rest of the country. You can get Amazon Prime shipping and rideshares everywhere now. Other cities may have somewhat less luxury retail, but likely have shorter drives with less traffic to get to nature.

justinzollars 6y ago

Where are you going?

bigyikes 6y ago
ATX, baby!
- justinzollars 6y ago
  Congratulations!

kilbuz 6y ago

Always have to ask, where are you moving and why did you pick it?

scottlocklin 6y ago
I always answer: fuck off; we're full. California, particularly Bay Area California is so ridiculously dysfunctional, the last thing any region needs is their refugees, who will bring with them the problems they're fleeing. Austin for example. Used to be a great place.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  That’s a ridiculous take. There’s a lot of technical talent trapped in the Bay Area and I welcome it in my region. Treating every resident as if they agree with the repressive SF politics is over generalizing. And who’s full? The main thing the flyover states need is more people.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    An influx of coastal refugees has driven real estate up and out of reach of many locals where I'm from. Those are the types of places that are "full", even with loads of building.
    - camjohnson26 6y ago
      You can buy a home cheap in Detroit, that’s not a good thing. Wouldn’t rising home values signal economic growth? As long as there’s room to expand I don’t see the problem. SF’s issue isn’t high prices, it’s archaic zoning laws that limit supply to keep prices high for home owners.
      - ummonk 6y ago
        I think there are two issues here. First, housing is somewhat inelastic in that it takes multiple years to respond to a rise in demand and plan out and build new housing even with a reasonably fast permitting / approval process. Second, due to labor and materials costs, the price of housing in many areas is far below the cost to build new housing so housing prices will necessarily go up even with maximum build rates. This can create affordability difficulties for the lower rungs of income.

grillvogel 6y ago

what happens if everyone goes back to the office in a year and now you're the only remote employee?

sudo-i 6y ago
Yes, this is what I worry about too. I've been hearing remote work is the future for many years now, but haven't seen much movement toward the goal. Now, we are in a pandemic and everyone is forced to be at home, not by choice, but by necessity. Everyone is still saying remote work is now accelerated, but no one had a choice if they wanted to work remotely or not... Of course there will be some increase in remote working after the pandemic, but I think the vast majority is going to return to the office. Not because they can't work from home, but just because they don't want to work from home.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
Agreed, people are way overestimating the impact of this. Most people I know can't wait for life to go back to normal. It's easy to move away when everyone is forced to. But when you need that new promotion when office life is back and someone else there is networking...you just gonna stay back in Tulsa? Doubtful.
boringg 6y ago
This is indeed what will likely happen given how many people actually don't love working full time remote. So all these media stories will swing the other way afterwards. Also way easier to cut people when you don't have to see them in the office every day.
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seppin 6y ago

> There just aren’t good reasons to live here anymore for so many of us The majority of people that say this are also the exact reason why the city is blackhole of culture and fun. You aren't in traffic, you are the traffic.

colechristensen 6y ago

I am likewise on my way out the door, not quite to the giving notice stage but not far either.