And at the same time there's a massive economic draw, California refuses to let the market provide anything like enough housing.
So you may have a liberating force in the way jobs have changed, but that works both ways.
People are moving to the big coastal cities. The big coastal cities (and states) are doing a piss poor job of accommodating this - actually they’ve taken active measures to worsen the housing problem with zoning and tax rules.
I would guess that google would get a lot more bang for its buck if it just outright bribed politicians with that $1 billion to enact policies that allowed constructing of more housing and better transit.
Hah - see my comment elsewhere.
Local politicians are definitely the choke point that doesn't allow the market to function properly.
Seriously though: It'd be great if apartments were better sound-proofed. My only gripe with apartment living was inadequate privacy and being woken up at 3 AM by a lead-footed upstairs resident.
[citation needed]
It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team.
There are a lot of shades of gray there, like, if someone commutes for 2 hours through stressful SF traffic to get to a campus where they jump on a Google Hangout since their team members are spread across 3 buildings... yeah, I don't think productivity is going to get much of a boost. However, our team is in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio where you can live within 30 miles, get here in 30 minutes and have dirt-cheap housing. I'm having a hard time coming up with collateral to support my "modern" viewpoint on the benefits of remote workers.
Southwest is the fun airline. What would american airlines have to do to become a fun airline? They would have to fire 2/3 of their staff.
[citation needed]
It's clearly important enough for Amazon, Facebook, and Google to invest heavily in already established tech hubs where it's incredibly expensive to build, so they can have their engineers working in the same physical location(s).
Effectively, what I'm reading is, "Because large tech companies do X, it's very important for everyone else too (including billion-dollar companies that don't do X)."
I'm saying, in spite of it being cheaper to distribute their engineers and hire remote, they do not. These aren't companies run by incompetent people, and they're large enough to have some remote workforce, so they understand how remote workers compare to onsite with as few other variables changed.
These companies hire onsite because it's important to be able to meet face-to-face. Emotion is particularly poorly conveyed over email or VC, and sometimes to convince somebody of something, meeting them in person is the best way to do that.
I'd contend that you're not considering the impact of sunk cost fallacies on business decision-making. Or if you have considered it, you've probably discounted it far more than is warranted.
It could be the case that, out of all the people currently employed by these companies, the majority believe they thrive in an onsite role rather than a remote one. Years of self-selection (especially if exacerbated by a lack of diversity in their employment experience, since these companies tend to hire out of colleges) could lead to a feedback loop.
Just because they're smart people doesn't mean they're impervious to human cognitive distortions.
How many of these companies have even trialed 100% remote positions, even if only for a year?
It's not about incompetence, it's about not willing to introduce difficult changes and admitting they are wrong. See: open plan offices.
There's tons of successful, fully distributed companies.
Humans can (and should) get their social needs met anywhere, not only at their place of employment.
I've worked both onsite and remote throughout my career. I'd never advocate for forced remote work (because some people want to get their social needs met through their employer).
Rather, I'd argue that it should be considered as an option.
I agree that not all roles require this sort of thing. There are employees who can come to the office, work 8 hours, and go home, all without speaking a word to another person. There are probably thousands of employees at Google who could probably be just as effective working remotely. That said, having worked there, I think that's not true for the vast majority of SWE work.
Jobs are about relationships.
To echo the refrain others have said in this thread, "Hire remote, hire remote, hire remote."
I would love to see HN's monthly Who's Hiring prioritize/bubble up fully remote jobs to the top of the list first. Give an advantage to those who are helping the situation. This is no different than roads. You can't just keep building roads forever. You have to destroy demand for local habitation once it reaches a point beyond which equilibrium can ever be reached, and the Bay Area is beyond that point. Let people work from places where they can afford to live better lives.
EDIT: @aerophilic: Agree entirely with your comment.
I have found that what is in general most effective is that EVERYONE on the team is remote, or everyone is co-located. You can do hybrids, remote work with an on site team if the remote folks are strong communicators and/or people that are more task oriented (Assuming you have someone to manage them) but there is a tax on doing so, and often they won’t feel as connected.
Even in the above hybrid example, there are specific things you need to “plan in” to be effective (things like an office buddy, regular sync up times, clear responsibilities/action lists, etc).
I'm way more likely to ask a co-worker over to my desk to show them something or have a discussion if they're a few feet away within sight and earshot. In an open office I also overhear a lot of pertinent information -- I'm aware of issues that might be relevant to me as they develop, I don't have to wait hours or days for someone to communicate them in an email, issue tracker, or meeting.
There's a cost in terms of readily available heads-down concentration time to be sure, but if I want to mess around with math formulas or something I pop on the headphones, go to a quiet room, or do it at home. It's much harder to replicate the benefits of an open office environment in a closed one than the reverse.
Why does it make sense to optimize for the former instead of the latter? The benefits must be studied in context of how overall productivity and bottomline is affected, not just easy it is to start talking to someone.
Perhaps I'm weird, but I'm not interested in working remote. It's isolating socially and politically, and I work slower over the medium term.
This factoid detracts from the argument; When the op is about a (or several) company individually worth about a trillion dollars.
For what purpose specifically?
On one end you have work where someone gives you well defined specs and the tools you need, and you just go crank out some code on your own. That works well for remote work.
On the other end there are plenty of software positions that require people who can understand and develop requirements, possibly by talking with disparate groups like customer support, finance, sales, marketing, and so on who are not at all technical. These people may not understand the costs of different options so subsequent conversations about costs/benefits for different groups are needed. Sometimes these discussions might be contentious, as resources are finite. Sometimes there's a lot of back and forth involved, as the software person tries to understand the business - and vice versa.
Even if face-to-face is important for specific positions it's even more rarely a daily requirement. Most of the country is so much less expensive than the Bay Area that you could fly someone in one day a week and it would still cost less.
Fringe benefit: Less payroll overhead since the cost of living in rural areas is much lower.
> that's not an easy problem to solve.
The solution is simple, it's just getting people to actually do it that's hard.
> And at the same time there's a massive economic draw, California refuses to let the market provide anything like enough housing.
I don't know enough about California's politics to provide insightful commentary, but from what I have heard, none of it was good or sane.
What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions?
> Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers.
Same question for that perspective, except I do have a few ideas of a cynical answer to that question from the company's perspective.
The advantage is that on the path in-between now and the perfect future where all companies are remote-first( that we are not sure will ever happen), you will not be at a significant disadvantage when it comes to job prospects. I don't think that many people would be willing to heavily limit their job prospects (not even taking into account all the other advantages that come with living in a densely populated coastal city) while waiting for that "bright all-remote future" that may never come.
But given a ceteris paribus comparison of the two, my question is what is inherently superior about the onsite position over the remote position?
However, local governments are still the ultimate deciders and many of them are opposed to new housing, such as in the SF Peninsula.
Other parts of CA are less resistant to new housing. In LA's downtown, for example, almost 50,000 units of new housing are being brought online between 2016-2021. In both Korea Town and Hollywood, more than 5,000 new units have come online in the past 3 years (and they're already the densest neighborhoods). In Marina Del Rey and Playa Del Rey, roughly 2500 new units have opened/will open up in 2018 and 2019. Along the Metro Expo Line, more than 25,000 residential units within 4 blocks of a station are planned or already under construction. Inglewood will see somewhere between 500 and 2500 new apartments in the neighborhood around the Sofi Stadium, not including other residential development. Even Santa Monica will see roughly 2000 new apartments over the next 2 years.
Edit: these are just the developments that I'm aware of. There are plenty more. If you're interested in following LA-area development, there are several Facebook groups devoted to this subject.
Software is dematerialised, which means, perversely, it tends to concentrate to a far greater extent. Much as local and regional entertainment, constrained by material proximiy to audience, gave way to Hollywood.
Don't forget housing is stupid expense in NJ as well. I wouldn't call NJ "desirable".
Maybe a town is incredibly racist and who lives there is all from the same longstanding community and they are all extremely close and have good personal relationships with each other and feel a strong sense of belonging to the place and the people. Maybe the town is perfectly suited to being students, young and single and there's a lot of things that cater to them. Maybe the town is better suited to families, couples, people who own dogs. Such people will gravitate there. This could mean they are all happy and healthy, but it would not mean that if I, some random bloke from a different state/culture/language/country moved there and tried to settle in and live my life, I would be particularly happy or healthy.
So yes, a place can be the happiest place in the world for the people who already live there, and still be undesirable for the "looking for a nice place to settle" population at large. However, having a highly employable, high income industry, lots of motivated hard workers, a vibrant art scene, and good weather makes a place a lot more universally desirable, and it takes a helluva lot of negatives to offset that desirability (which the bay area is trying really hard to do).
That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company.
The large house with an acre of land gives you other opportunities, but if that one specific dimension is what you care about then it falls short.
- Good schools
- Lots of like-minded people to befriend
- Lots of places to eat, activities, venues, etc.
- Several higher and continuing education opportunities
- Good (well, better than almost all mid-sized cities, at least) public transit options
I definitely understand the appeal of living out in the country, but, for reasons I don't entirely understand, on many threads like this, people seem to completely overlook all of the myriad ways that living in a city is actually great.
It's not all grim concrete jungle hellscape. If I lived out in the sticks, I could afford a couple of acres and a +2,000 square foot home. But I couldn't afford a zoo, aquarium, bike trail, running path, music venue, movie theater, personal chef, playground, and coffee house to go with it.
The fundamental tenet of urban density is that by giving up some personal space, we all get access to a much greater variety of shared spaces.
Perhaps if you live adjacent to a major national park or forest, or marine preserve, but most easily habitable rural areas are not that, and instead are industrially farmed or extracted from - essentially factories. Sure, there are exceptions, but not enough to accommodate the number of people that it would take to make a difference in cost of living in urban areas, not without ruining the access to wildlife viewing that makes those places unique in the first place.
> bike trail, running path
The environment doesn't provide either of these. They are created by many people either re-using the same route routinely, or by some institution building and maintaining them.
...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord.
If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay, it'd remove the financial incentive to move to these cities. This would have a lot of immediate obvious benefits.
The relevant statistic to compare is actual housing cost vs actual compensation in both types of places. For many types of tech jobs, the number still favors big cities, if not in percentage terms, then in absolute numbers.
And when it comes down to a real life decision, there are plenty of other factors (financial or otherwise) besides that one statistic.
$12000 doesn't mean the same thing when you consider the cost of living difference between the urban and rural areas.
$12k goes way farther towards purchasing goods and services in the rural area, so naturally it seems like an awful lot of money there, but it purchases far fewer goods and services in a big city. This is similar to how household incomes between different countries aren't directly comparable until you adjust for Purchasing Power Parity [1].
That doesn't mean that all big city dwellers are better off. Some undoubtedly are, and some are definitely not.
We actually agree here. I think we're speaking past each other.
I'm arguing that "only $12,000" is dismissive of how impactful a difference that makes to the lives of people who don't live in a big city.
But the $12k in question isn't a fungible $12k. It's specifically the difference in housing costs between urban and rural in the example given earlier.
If the point is that many people in rural areas are economically struggling, then yes we agree, just as many poorer urban dwellers are (and to whom a random $12k received would also be hugely impactful), but that has nothing to do with example proposed.
> If the point is that many people in rural areas are economically struggling, then yes we agree, just as many poorer urban dwellers are (and to whom a random $12k received would also be hugely impactful), but that has nothing to do with example proposed.
My point was that the OP's use of the phrase "only $12,000" is offensive, classist language in the context it was written in. That point is unrelated to the rest of the discussion.
I don't get why anyone would want to double down on defending this language, especially since you weren't the person who used it. But here we are.
But hey, if $12,000/year is peanuts to anyone reading this thread: https://www.patreon.com/ciphpercoder
OP wasn't talking down. They used "only" to compare the difference in housing cost to the much higher difference in wages between rural and urban areas, as in $12K housing cost increase < $40k salary increase, not to imply that $12K is inconsequential in an absolute sense.
$12K out of most people's pockets is a lot of money (including if it were out of mine), but the OP wasn't implying that it isn't.
They were making a simple observation that:
big city salary - big city housing costs > rural salary - rural housing costs
Looks like they even responded below stating precisely that.
There's real classism out there, often expressed across the rural/urban divide, but this isn't an example of it.
It's not trivial to do this calculation. Some things will surprise you:
You can get cheaper electricity bills in Seattle than where I live (Naples, FL), but you don't need air conditioning in Seattle. Living in Florida without AC is ill-advised.
Why would they do that? They only pay as much as they do in Silicon Valley to offset the cost of living.
In education, both schools and universities, Chicagoland would compare very favorably with Bay Area (stepkid went to schools in both; entirely unimpressed with BA schools).
In job opportunities at FAANG-type companies Bay Area obviously comes out ahead,but for the vast majority of people both in and out of high tech Chicago both has jobs and is actually affordable and salaries are lower by a far lesser amount than the cost of living, at least if you believe all of the comparison sites like Numbeo. In my personal experience I've had much more money left over in Chicago, working for as Chicago company than working for one in Sunnyvale, and that's even before adding up intangibles of better (well, for the USA, anyway) public transit, better museums, theaters, etc. etc.
On climate BA might win on paper, but personally I like to have actual seasons.
Nice, I've lived in both and Chicago winters made me want to kill myself. If all else was equal I'd pay significant sums to live in the Bay Area simply because the weather.
Of course if I had the same living conditions in Chicago as in Bay Area and had to dig the car out every morning, I'd think differently, too. But of course in Chicago one can afford a nice place with a garage in a hot area for less money than a cardboard box in SV.
Unfortunately I haven't seen many roles in, say, Dallas or Atlanta where the pay is only 20-25K or so less than my current, total-comp wise. It'd be a bigger drop, usually. The rent gap is steep, but the comp gap can be larger.
I pay less on my mortgage for a large house with over an acre of land than friends of mine pay for rent for studio apartments in San Francisco or Seattle.
Investing $1B into housing in the Bay Area seems nice at the surface, but maybe if we stopped demanding everyone be willing to relocate to one of a handful of cities to work in our industry, we'll solve the root cause of the problem.