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COVID forcing remote work was that tipping point. I think it was a lot more tenuous beforehand than generally believed due to the cost of living. Great progra

COVID forcing remote work was that tipping point. I think it was a lot more tenuous beforehand than generally believed due to the cost of living. Great programmers can come from anywhere with the internet. California has some of the most stringent COVID restrictions in the US, and also the highest costs of living when looking at Bay Area and LA. There's no point to bring people there, especially if they're just going to working from home for the foreseeable future anyways. I've been remote for several years (pre-COVID). For $600k, they could hire 2 or 3 engineers where I live, still doubling or tripling the local tech pay, and give those engineers the opportunity to buy (or build) and pay off a house in a few years.

jacobolus 5y ago
> California has some of the most stringent COVID restrictions in the US, Note that the Bay Area (and SF especially) has had the best Covid outcomes of any metro area in the USA with the exception of Honolulu, with like 1/3 the deaths of most other places. Bay Area Covid response (both government action and individual choices and behavior) has saved a lot of local residents’ lives and prevented a lot of future chronic illness. Or to put it more starkly, if everywhere in the US were as on the ball as the Bay Area, at least 500,000 more Americans would still be alive.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  Comparing this: https://sf.gov/data/covid-19-cases-and-deaths https://sf.gov/data/covid-19-cases-and-deaths ...to this: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/state/texas/county/austin-county https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr... ...does not suggest that SF is doing anything extraordinary. Comparing to the national average involves comparing to places like NYC, that got hammered early when the death rate was at its highest.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    According to the NYT, Austin county has had 193 confirmed Covid deaths per 100k throughout the pandemic. San Francisco has had 78 deaths per 100k. So Austin county has had about 2.5x more deaths than SF per capita. Note that Austin county is not related to the city of Austin, Texas. The city of Austin is in Travis county, which has had 118 confirmed Covid deaths per 100k, pretty much the best results anywhere in Texas. (Because people in Austin have also been cautious, and the local government has taken what actions it could despite state-level opposition.)
    - rossdavidh 5y ago
      Ha! That's what I get for using a search engine and not checking closely enough what it sends me to. But the difference between either one and NYC, is larger than the difference in policy. More importantly, perhaps, the peaks (for NYC, Austin, or most other places) occurred in either the heat of the summer, or the depths of winter. If you compare the deaths in SF to the deaths in other cities when the weather was similar, you don't see much difference.
      - jacobolus 5y ago
        Weather obviously correlates with people spending time together indoors, but it’s not the only relevant factor. Government policy and individual choices determine to a large extent how many risky exposures people undergo and how risky they are. Notice that e.g. Vermont had very low numbers of deaths, while similarly cold places in the midwest had much higher death rates. The difference is primarily political, not demographic or weather-related. In pre-omicron waves, the virus got to dense exposure in one place then spread geographically outward like a wave or fire (omicron has moved too fast for that pattern to be as visible). For example NYC, Boston, etc. were the initial epicenter in early 2020 (Seattle and the Bay Area also had plenty of early cases but strong reactions flattened the curve); the fall/winter 2020 wave pretty much started at the Sturgis motorcycle rally then spread outward across much of the country from South Dakota; and Florida was the initial epicenter for the Delta variant, which later spread throughout the south, then later on to the northeast, midwest, and west. These geographic waves of infection have perhaps as much to do with epidemic timing as local weather patterns. But severity of each wave has more to do with local social responses than with precise start timing. County by county or state by state comparisons in the USA are pretty stark (>5x difference between best vs. worst results), but are still limited to a large extent by common features of the federal response, American media environment, etc. If you look at international comparisons, there are 20x or 50x differences in outcome between countries caused by more starkly differing policy responses (obviously lower income countries are much more constrained than high income countries, but within each category some countries have had much worse policy response than others). Countries with fast, coordinated responses who empowered health officials, communicated clearly to the public, and dedicated the necessary resources ended up doing very well in comparison to those who made excuses, blamed others, misinformed the public, sat on their hands, and prioritized politics over health.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    That's 100% what people are missing. I lived in NYC till 2021. It's a global city, unlike SF, where COVID hit early and hard. It's a highly concentrated city as well, that few other places can rival. It's not a car town, that forces people closer. By all oranges to oranges comparison - Bay Area isn't a standout.
    - biztos 5y ago
      > a highly concentrated city as well, that few other places can rival If you mean population density, New York isn't even particularly competitive once you get out of the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_cities_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_cities_by_popula... I lived for 8 years in SF without once driving a car, so I'm not sure what the "car town" thing means in this case. And yes NYC is a global city but not more than LA is. Per the NYT, LA had 277 deaths per 100K and NYC had 435. Not sure what the argument is here.
      - dh5 5y ago
        If you just count Manhattan at ~70,000 / sq mi it's certainly up there in terms of population density. The outer boroughs (and Staten Island specifically) pull down the average quite a bit.
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      Covid didn’t “hit early and hard” in the Bay Area because people and government in the Bay Area took (relative to the US) strong, fast countermeasures. Before that we were on track to be similar to NYC but a couple weeks behind. NYC got unlucky being the first place in the US with significant spread (and being a dense, transit-dependent city), but local and state government also severely fucked up the initial response, reacting too slowly and not aggressively enough (e.g. if NYC schools had closed a few weeks earlier, it would have saved a huge number of residents’ lives, but the mayor was afraid closing schools would make him look bad). And NYC in 2020 could have easily been twice as bad as it was, if it had reacted even later than it did. The lesson here is that public health response matters, public health officials should be empowered, and political leaders should act as fast as possible instead of dithering around and trying to pass blame.
- owenversteeg 5y ago
  Death rates go hand in hand with income, obesity rate, age, and general health pre-covid among many other things. You absolutely can’t simply compare death rates from one state to the next that easily without controlling for variables such as age (many times more deadly for the elderly), wealth (multiple times more deadly for the poorest vs. the richest), obesity rate, weather etc etc. This is why several countries have far lower or higher deaths than other countries with very similar strategies.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    Death rates go hand in hand with (delayed a few weeks) unvaccinated people getting together indoors without high-quality masks, and breathing each-others’ breath. People working public-facing jobs or indoor jobs with many coworkers, taking public transit, with kids in daycare, etc. end up with a lot more inevitable inter-household exposure. And obviously people who are elderly, immune compromised, or with other health problems face (orders-of-magnitude) higher individual risk when infected. But personal choices to avoid exposure make a huge difference to the reproductive rate of the virus. And government responses providing free test capacity, mandating masks in indoor public spaces, restricting indoor dining, early in the pandemic closing gyms and schools, providing places for people to isolate away from their households, providing financial support for people unable to do their jobs safely, guaranteeing sick pay, etc., and recommendations discouraging unmasked indoor inter-household mingling make a huge difference. SF has not been perfect by any means. Something like a third of the deaths throughout the pandemic were caused by spread resulting from the relaxation of the restriction on indoor dining for a couple months in the fall of 2020. Early on the city did a poor job getting test capacity where it was most needed in low-income neighborhoods. The city could do a better job providing and encouraging the use of high quality masks. The messaging on boosters hasn’t been forceful enough. And city guidance was too slow to react to changing scientific knowledge (e.g. a 6-foot rule makes limited difference; sanitizing surfaces is useless; masks need not be mandated outdoors except maybe in dense crowds). But overall response here has been faster and more competent than almost anywhere else in the USA.
- pyjarrett 5y ago
  I'm not commenting on the need or efficacy of COVID restrictions either way, just their positive effect towards promoting remote work.

jacobolus 5y ago

> California has some of the most stringent COVID restrictions in the US, Note that the Bay Area (and SF especially) has had the best Covid outcomes of any metro area in the USA with the exception of Honolulu, with like 1/3 the deaths of most other places. Bay Area Covid response (both government action and individual choices and behavior) has saved a lot of local residents’ lives and prevented a lot of future chronic illness. Or to put it more starkly, if everywhere in the US were as on the ball as the Bay Area, at least 500,000 more Americans would still be alive.

rossdavidh 5y ago
Comparing this: https://sf.gov/data/covid-19-cases-and-deaths https://sf.gov/data/covid-19-cases-and-deaths ...to this: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/state/texas/county/austin-county https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr... ...does not suggest that SF is doing anything extraordinary. Comparing to the national average involves comparing to places like NYC, that got hammered early when the death rate was at its highest.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  According to the NYT, Austin county has had 193 confirmed Covid deaths per 100k throughout the pandemic. San Francisco has had 78 deaths per 100k. So Austin county has had about 2.5x more deaths than SF per capita. Note that Austin county is not related to the city of Austin, Texas. The city of Austin is in Travis county, which has had 118 confirmed Covid deaths per 100k, pretty much the best results anywhere in Texas. (Because people in Austin have also been cautious, and the local government has taken what actions it could despite state-level opposition.)
  - rossdavidh 5y ago
    Ha! That's what I get for using a search engine and not checking closely enough what it sends me to. But the difference between either one and NYC, is larger than the difference in policy. More importantly, perhaps, the peaks (for NYC, Austin, or most other places) occurred in either the heat of the summer, or the depths of winter. If you compare the deaths in SF to the deaths in other cities when the weather was similar, you don't see much difference.
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      Weather obviously correlates with people spending time together indoors, but it’s not the only relevant factor. Government policy and individual choices determine to a large extent how many risky exposures people undergo and how risky they are. Notice that e.g. Vermont had very low numbers of deaths, while similarly cold places in the midwest had much higher death rates. The difference is primarily political, not demographic or weather-related. In pre-omicron waves, the virus got to dense exposure in one place then spread geographically outward like a wave or fire (omicron has moved too fast for that pattern to be as visible). For example NYC, Boston, etc. were the initial epicenter in early 2020 (Seattle and the Bay Area also had plenty of early cases but strong reactions flattened the curve); the fall/winter 2020 wave pretty much started at the Sturgis motorcycle rally then spread outward across much of the country from South Dakota; and Florida was the initial epicenter for the Delta variant, which later spread throughout the south, then later on to the northeast, midwest, and west. These geographic waves of infection have perhaps as much to do with epidemic timing as local weather patterns. But severity of each wave has more to do with local social responses than with precise start timing. County by county or state by state comparisons in the USA are pretty stark (>5x difference between best vs. worst results), but are still limited to a large extent by common features of the federal response, American media environment, etc. If you look at international comparisons, there are 20x or 50x differences in outcome between countries caused by more starkly differing policy responses (obviously lower income countries are much more constrained than high income countries, but within each category some countries have had much worse policy response than others). Countries with fast, coordinated responses who empowered health officials, communicated clearly to the public, and dedicated the necessary resources ended up doing very well in comparison to those who made excuses, blamed others, misinformed the public, sat on their hands, and prioritized politics over health.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  That's 100% what people are missing. I lived in NYC till 2021. It's a global city, unlike SF, where COVID hit early and hard. It's a highly concentrated city as well, that few other places can rival. It's not a car town, that forces people closer. By all oranges to oranges comparison - Bay Area isn't a standout.
  - biztos 5y ago
    > a highly concentrated city as well, that few other places can rival If you mean population density, New York isn't even particularly competitive once you get out of the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_cities_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_cities_by_popula... I lived for 8 years in SF without once driving a car, so I'm not sure what the "car town" thing means in this case. And yes NYC is a global city but not more than LA is. Per the NYT, LA had 277 deaths per 100K and NYC had 435. Not sure what the argument is here.
    - dh5 5y ago
      If you just count Manhattan at ~70,000 / sq mi it's certainly up there in terms of population density. The outer boroughs (and Staten Island specifically) pull down the average quite a bit.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    Covid didn’t “hit early and hard” in the Bay Area because people and government in the Bay Area took (relative to the US) strong, fast countermeasures. Before that we were on track to be similar to NYC but a couple weeks behind. NYC got unlucky being the first place in the US with significant spread (and being a dense, transit-dependent city), but local and state government also severely fucked up the initial response, reacting too slowly and not aggressively enough (e.g. if NYC schools had closed a few weeks earlier, it would have saved a huge number of residents’ lives, but the mayor was afraid closing schools would make him look bad). And NYC in 2020 could have easily been twice as bad as it was, if it had reacted even later than it did. The lesson here is that public health response matters, public health officials should be empowered, and political leaders should act as fast as possible instead of dithering around and trying to pass blame.
owenversteeg 5y ago
Death rates go hand in hand with income, obesity rate, age, and general health pre-covid among many other things. You absolutely can’t simply compare death rates from one state to the next that easily without controlling for variables such as age (many times more deadly for the elderly), wealth (multiple times more deadly for the poorest vs. the richest), obesity rate, weather etc etc. This is why several countries have far lower or higher deaths than other countries with very similar strategies.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  Death rates go hand in hand with (delayed a few weeks) unvaccinated people getting together indoors without high-quality masks, and breathing each-others’ breath. People working public-facing jobs or indoor jobs with many coworkers, taking public transit, with kids in daycare, etc. end up with a lot more inevitable inter-household exposure. And obviously people who are elderly, immune compromised, or with other health problems face (orders-of-magnitude) higher individual risk when infected. But personal choices to avoid exposure make a huge difference to the reproductive rate of the virus. And government responses providing free test capacity, mandating masks in indoor public spaces, restricting indoor dining, early in the pandemic closing gyms and schools, providing places for people to isolate away from their households, providing financial support for people unable to do their jobs safely, guaranteeing sick pay, etc., and recommendations discouraging unmasked indoor inter-household mingling make a huge difference. SF has not been perfect by any means. Something like a third of the deaths throughout the pandemic were caused by spread resulting from the relaxation of the restriction on indoor dining for a couple months in the fall of 2020. Early on the city did a poor job getting test capacity where it was most needed in low-income neighborhoods. The city could do a better job providing and encouraging the use of high quality masks. The messaging on boosters hasn’t been forceful enough. And city guidance was too slow to react to changing scientific knowledge (e.g. a 6-foot rule makes limited difference; sanitizing surfaces is useless; masks need not be mandated outdoors except maybe in dense crowds). But overall response here has been faster and more competent than almost anywhere else in the USA.
pyjarrett 5y ago
I'm not commenting on the need or efficacy of COVID restrictions either way, just their positive effect towards promoting remote work.