I wonder if this concept really sticks...

I worked for a company that was acquired that was based in Minnesota. The acquiring company absolutely could not find warm bodies in the bay area to do ... tech support. So they finally asked if the bumpkins in Minnesota could help out.

I traveled out there and everyone was very nice but I had things explained to me like I hadn't used a computer before, or couldn't follow a simple process. One of the directors asked me "What do people in Minnesota do for work?" I told him "Same as around here.", he found that hard to believe and told me about how is team were all high performers in college with fancy degrees and such.

Anyway a month later my team is out performing the valley team with higher customer service scores (funny that if you actually call your customers they like it, you can solve problems faster...) and so on. All with a smaller team and at ~2/3rds the price (possibly less).

I mean it was just tech support, on some fairly high end equipment. But still it was not rocket science.

A few years later to save costs ... they skip Minnesota try disastrously to offshore to India.

Then after the company is acquired again they take the opportunity to axe everyone in MN, and again ... can't find anyone to work in the bay...

I just don't know, these choices seem sort of institutionalized / culture oriented.

Once upon a time I brought a team of star struck developers to the Valley. I reminded them that the people there were not wearing capes and flying to work. They were developers just like any others. It helped settle their minds and funny enough the flyover country developers produced code on par or better than what came out of the Valley.

> funny enough the flyover country developers produced code on par or better than what came out of the Valley

What would you attribute this to?

I live in Minnesota. My impression is that employee turnover is ~2-3x higher in coastal markets, which I'd expect to lead to (1) less willingness to obtain company-specific/business domain-specific expertise, (2) more fire drills/"we'll fix it later" syndrome as people leave at inopportune times, and (3) more resume-driven development, which in turn means more time spent working with unfamiliar and/or inappropriate frameworks. In terms of intelligence and coding ability there's probably about zero difference on average, but the environment here just seems more conducive to building quality stuff.

Ironically, a lot of the big employers around here still think dev salaries in Minnesota are too high and are increasingly squandering that advantage by bringing in contractors from H1B body shops instead of continuing to develop talent internally.

It's funny you mention it. When I went to visit the bay area folks I told them I'd been with the same employer for 10 years... they were a little shocked by that.

I've been with 3 different employers 10 years +/- 3 years. I expect many in the Valley would find that... odd.

Personally? Less stressful day to day.

> A few years later to save costs ... they skip Minnesota try disastrously to offshore to India.

That's funny, because I was following along thinking your point was geographic region doesn't predict performance. Do you find it hard to believe it's possible to have an Indian team with who were high performers in college with fancy degrees and such?

Generally, I don't see any insurmountable impediment to outsourcing to India. I don't know of any reason they couldn't have outsourced successfully.

The experience I had there was a disaster... because of the company they chose to use to outsource just couldn't keep capable people on staff for more than a month or two. The folks who stayed, were just terrible / couldn't troubleshoot their way out of a box and IMO had some perverse incentives. I suspect there was an incentive revolving around "closed cases" and like all metrics that got abused and it was costly for everyone.

My email was filled with "please assign this case to duxup" cases that were in the hands of our outsource partners (and sometimes the bay area..) because folks recognized the case wasn't going anywhere fast.

The company even tried hiring folks locally at an office they had but again they couldn't keep anyone (probably again paying poorly) who was good very long.

I don't know the job market in India (then or now) but I suspect they simply weren't paying well / had a very poor partner outsourcing company.

I've had some visibility to various outsourcing efforts and every time it seems that the companies they partner with just don't provide much in the way of stable talent. I would assume it is possible to find a company who does, but I just haven't had that experience. I suspect that is more random chance than anything else.

Personally I suspect that most companies just decide, "We're outsourcing and we're going to save X amount!" and without knowing or caring they priced their way into poorly done outsourcing ... and only that. Interesting enough, I heard we hadn't saved much of any money long term with the outsourcing effort. Largely hiring just didn't keep up with sales and any savings in support costs there were attributed to outsourced support.

It was somewhat amusing as many of the Bay area staff were from India (they weren't H1Bs, they were citizens), and man nobody hated the the outsourced support more than those guys ;)

Thanks for clarifying. I was taken aback since your terse summary of the failure gave me the impression that the failure was because they outsourced to India, which runs counter to what I believed was your narrative core on the subject of geographic exceptionalism.

> Do you find it hard to believe it's possible to have an Indian team with who were high performers in college with fancy degrees and such?

Do you think that's what they were saying? Possibly you can apply an iota of charity and come with a couple of reasons why Minnesota and India are not fungible locations?

> I traveled out there and everyone was very nice but I had things explained to me like I hadn't used a computer before, or couldn't follow a simple process.

This sounds eerily similar to the experience of being a woman in the same kind of circles. It’s actually kind of heartening to see a pattern across different groups, though, since that helps me know it probably isn’t personal in either case :)

I think a large percentage of people live in cities for reasons other than work, whether they know it or not. I think a lot of them idealize living in small cities/rural areas because of space and lower cost of living, but they never actually tried it. I could probably save a lot of money by moving out of NYC, but I'd rather live in a place that gives me access to museums, restaurants, experiences, etc rather than saving money and going to the same 5-10 places over and over.

Or access to arguably more important infrastructure: I live within walking distance of a major hospital, 2 grocery stores, my family doctor & dentist, all our schools and at least half my children's activities. a rural or even more suburban home would definitely mean longer trips by car for all those things.

honest question / thought - I wonder what the time difference is between you getting to the hospital in an emergency (heart attack / stroke) vs myself in my rural scenario. Your walking distance isn't going to matter at that point but traffic will. Or do the hospitals have a sort of emergency foot patrol than can be dispatched to you?

(I'm sure that sounds goofy, but it's a serious question/thought. I've never lived in an area that could be dubbed 'urban')

Most major cities will have multiple hospitals coordinating amongst a grid and EMT/fire stations that are localized as well. Depending on traffic you should be at the hospital in under 15. The hospitals may have specialties (head trauma, pediatrics, etc) that are in different city hospitals. These may not be available at all in smaller hospitals.

When I used to visit the countryside 1 hospital would serve an entire county or more. And if you couldn't be driven it was an expensive helicopter ride.

But, you have to take into account the differences in affordability across the city, especially in NYC.

Are people going to want to live in Tudor City if they only have to go to work 1-2x per week? Or do you get a bigger space in Brooklyn or Queens since the commute matters less.

NYC will always have desirable qualities, it always has, but if you look at the desirability of different areas of the city they have changed significantly over time, and could shift to include more distant areas that still have convenient access to the city (Newark, Poughkeepsie, etc.).

I'd rather see the world than to be stuck in the same city. There is a lot more out there than uniquely arranged food at the newest restaurant.

This is not what the post to which you're replying is advocating, quite the opposite. People in big cities get far more exposure to "the world" than outside of these centers, mostly because the world comes to them every day.

The world doesn't come to NYC. Most of the world could never afford to travel there. What a horrible outlook.

That may be true, but the world's definitely not coming to whatever small town you'd live in in Upstate NY moreso. Living in a city doesn't mean you never leave it any more than living in the country does.

With so many people in NYC spending all their money on rent, it certainly does.

Do you have any evidence of this? Almost everyone I know who travels to "see the world" lives in a major city, and almost everyone I know who lives in a smaller town hasn't even left the country in their lives.

There's something to be said for the sadness of not having the money to travel the world, but that doesn't seem particularly better for people out of cities in my experience.

>Almost everyone I know who travels to "see the world" lives in a major city, and almost everyone I know who lives in a smaller town hasn't even left the country in their lives.

And probably most of the people I know live in smaller towns outside of (many quite a way outside of) major cities or in/near smaller cities and many travel a great deal.

Yea, not to say it's not the case. We're both trading anecdotes here. I'm sure there's probably statistics for it though.

My assumption would be that the amount to which someone travels is fairly correlated to their income, adjusted for local cost of living? I'm not sure where that would be higher though.

There's a big difference between in major cities and near major cities. Certainly, not all that long ago, wealthier people mostly lived in suburbs though that's probably not as generally true today for coastal cities in particular. I tend to know more older people who mostly don't live in urban cores.

I moved to a small town and I bought a lot of land because I am trying to become a YouTube and own a lot of machines and post lots of projects.

I can't get the land in city at affordable price.

Luckily for you, cities also have airports!

And importantly non-stop flights to more than a handful of destinations from those airports. Living near a major airport rather than a small regional airport can significantly cut the total travel time and cost even with the added inconveniences of large airports.

You mean I can save a couple hundred dollars on my flights if I live somewhere that costs thousands of extra dollars on rent?

For me it's more about the time savings. If you live a short Uber from a major airport, you can hop from your doorstep to most of the continent in a half-day, then enjoy the second half of your day at your destination.

But if you're a 45 minute drive from a smaller airport, you've got to spend time dealing with parking, then padded layovers, and often by the time you get to your destination you're kinda wiped, so you end up burning a whole day of PTO just to move from point A to point B. Long-weekend trips aren't even really viable.

No, generally airports associated with cities are not in the cities. SFO isn't even in San Francisco county.

> No, generally airports associated with cities are not in the cities. SFO isn't even in San Francisco county.

Not being in the County of San Francisco is not a different or more significant fact than not being in the City of San Francisco, they are not merely geographically coextensive but the same entity, the City and County of San Francisco; which has a mayor as it's executive (like other CA cities) but, instead of a City Council, a Board of Supervisors (like other CA counties) as it's legislature.

I guess HN is more anti social than average, but I'm convinced that most people want to work with others. I certainly do.

That said, there is probably enough pent up demand of people who really want it, for numbers to go up substantially from here.

I agree with the position that most people like the social aspect of going to work. HN is very very much a bubble in this regard.

Before I had kids, I loved going to the office. I used to commute 1.5 hours each way to go to the office in San Francisco, because I loved being there and I loved ending my workday in San Francisco, which gave me the chance to take advantage of the cultural activities in San Francisco when I wanted to.

But I have kids now. I much prefer working from home, because it gives me the flexibility to go to their mid-day events, or be home in time for (future) after school activities, and just to see them more.

Even when my commute was only 12 minutes each way, I would still leave home at 9am and not be back until 7pm. I'd barely get to see the kids that way.

For me it's all about being able to see the kids more.

I don't just like the social aspect, though that's real.

I also get more and better work done around people than home alone.

I'm really curious to see how this actually pans out. As someone who enjoys remote work it's tempting to look at the situation today and say "finally! The fever has broken! Employers will realise how great remote work is!", but in reality a lot of the current remote working situations are a complete shitshow. I think we on HN feel it less because we're already a very tech-literate crowd, so remote video conferencing and collaborative editing (e.g. GitHub) is nothing new to us. But we're not normal in that regard.

I wonder if we'll see a sharp swing to the reverse once this pandemic is controlled (however that actually ends up looking). This experience might actually poison people's opinions of remote work in the longer term, not boost them. I hope to be wrong.

I've been number crunching the last few weeks for my next startup. I can't compete with big tech companies in salary but I can give the ability for them to relocate to where ever they really want to live. I've been really surprised how many conversations I've had with people interested in giving up huge salaries for the freedom to live where they want.

That isn't a new phenomenon though, surely? The idea of leaving SF etc. and working somewhere remote for a better life balance has been a discussion for some time now.

The tech companies aren't just in SF anymore. The salaries they pay in for example, Austin, are roughly the same. The living wage adjustment is kind of a joke. A decade ago I could find senior engineers willing to come on for $70K/year. Now it's hard finding someone under $200K that isn't getting $100K+ in equity.

I live in the city. Having a job in the city is just a bonus. And when I started professionally working I lived in the city and all my jobs were in suburban office parks. So commuting was never a concern because I never really faced the traffic. I love living in the city but not at the prices they were trying to charge.

I loved the idea of AirBnB when it was a niche player. The idea of staying in local neighborhoods was really appealing. But now, entire blocks have been converted to AirBnBs and the local neighborhood is just a bunch of tourists and the locals who hate them.

The point of the article is that corporate house buying is coming back strong, and much of this is centered around highly leveraged AirBNB properties. Redfin offers will be way under market (he states "more margin"), so owners are going to take a bath.

The real story here is that corporate buying will sink housing prices. Thanks to AirBNB.

It's not about remote work.

I wish I was renting an AirBnB by the beach instead of an apartment in a big city. If this quarantine continues I might as well do that.

I don’t think the remote work culture will last. Remote work is fine when you already know what needs to be done. So it works well in task-based jobs. But in terms of deciding what needs to be done, and planning for the future, only the most exceptionally well-managed companies have managed to make remote work effective.

Remote work, as a percent of office workers, has been growing for years.

I live in a small mountain town where the majority of people bring their jobs with them when they moved here.

After working from home (and on workations) for seven years, I finally joined a coworking space. Coworking truly is the best of both worlds. And the ski resort if only a few minutes away.

Now, with the shutdowns, I have to work out of my beautiful affordable house. Dang.

If you have a job that can be remote, you should. Cities and offices suck!

I think Apple's engineers could develop the next version of the Apple Watch remotely. But I don't think they could come up with the idea and designs for the original Apple Watch remotely.