Why would I want to live in a city and compete with the best of the best? I don't want my kids to go to a top school in an urban environment. I want them to do well in an above-average suburban school and have access to recreational activities outside the city. I want to live an affordable life that allows me to save and build wealth. I want a good work/life balance. I don't see the city providing me any of that. The city is for a special type of person. For people like me, it's just constant stress.

Who's competing? Stack rank firing went out in the 90's. Part of being the best I can be involves surrounding myself with the smartest people I can find. I don't want to be the smartest person in the room, and I find I learn more working alongside the best of the best, even (especially) if I'm the dumbest person there.

What better way is there other than online to find the smartest person or any group ?

What's stressful about living in the city for you?

What isn't? Noise, traffic, expense, crowding, lack of green space, no sense of community, it's just an extremely hostile environment for human neurology.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3079

Personally some folks are energized by the activity. I find it particularly draining. Little things like needing to time my laundry so my neighbor doesn’t pull mine out and move ahead of me in line cause me to spend my weekends stressing instead of relaxing.

I also don’t get a ton out of cultural experiences like art exhibits and high end dining. For me, I recharge by sitting in some dirt next to a campfire with friends I’ve had since grade school.

Like I said, everyone is different, but for me the city was all cost and no payoff.

If I knew I could work remote indefinitely, I’d find a nice house in a bikeable neighborhood with a good school district and have a lot of bbqs with the neighbors.

Even if you lose competing against the best, you're still better off than the ones not in the competition.

Better off in what sense? I think it depends on one's life goals and value system. I've seen people live amazingly fulfilling lives in flyover country while making average incomes, far better than an average income earner stuck in a big city.

Everyone has their own set of values - I don't judge your decisions at all in this case.

However, to give some perspective, I grew up in a rural/suburban "flyover" town. There are parts of my childhood that I would love my own children to have - running outdoors, opportunities to try things without committing to the (sure, I'll sign up for the baseball team and see what happens), etc

But what I realize that I missed was the knowledge of how big the world was. I thought going to the local state college was "making it." I didn't understand how the world worked or what was possible. I missed out on opportunities because I didn't realize that I should be looking for them.

A great book on the subject is Hillbilly Elegy. It tracks closely with my own experiences (though I can say that I am fortunate to not have some of the challenges that the author faced).

Based on my experiences, I have chosen to expose my children to the wide world of opportunities out there. Yes, I am terrified of the stress and anxiety that might accompany that, but I am also confident that it is what would set them up to be successful in this global society

I grew up in an exburb of what, at the time, was a 3rd rate city so I sort of understand what you went through. That said, it wasn't hard for my family to expose me to big cities via travel. I definitely missed out on college prep, but that was a failure of my family's culture and not something I would blame on my location. I was actually able to rise to the top(state electronics competition) thanks to being a big fish in a small pond. In most major cities I never would have gotten that far.

There's nothing about living in a smaller town that says you have to compromise the expectations you set for your kids. For some reason, native-born Americans often fall into that trap, while immigrant parents understand and push their children regardless. Moving outside of a major city isn't about completely giving up, its about choosing a different track for your life.

That's a fair point.

I think the impact that parents have is much larger than location. Period.

I didn't mean to imply that big city = success, small town = giving up. My apologies if it came across that way

My experience was that my parents didn't have the knowledge to know how to push (not their fault - their parents also didn't have that perspective). In small towns, unless you have parents showing you the world, it is hard to find it on your own

> I grew up in an exburb of what, at the time, was a 3rd rate city so I sort of understand what you went through. That said, it wasn't hard for my family to expose me to big cities via travel. I definitely missed out on college prep, but that was a failure of my family's culture and not something I would blame on my location. I was actually able to rise to the top(state electronics competition) thanks to being a big fish in a small pond. In most major cities I never would have gotten that far.

Your kids will be living a lonely lifestyle. People don't live in rural areas and still manage to do lots of travel, have a great education, and so forth. Your kids will be the exception... I grew up in smaller towns (4,000 7+ years, 5,000 6+ years, 20,000 3 years) that were 3+ hours from a major city. I had never even visited the city before I was 18 because my parents couldn't afford traveling. I don't think my experience was too uncommon.

And education? Eh - real bad. At least in a major city you have a choice between a few schools and you could theoretically find a nice private school too.

> But what I realize that I missed was the knowledge of how big the world was. I thought going to the local state college was "making it." I didn't understand how the world worked or what was possible. I missed out on opportunities because I didn't realize that I should be looking for them.

This hits it on the head. If you grow up in a region without opportunity, you just don't know that it exists elsewhere.

The biggest problem I had with living in rural areas was the lack of opportunity. I was always taking the most "advanced" classes - but at schools in cities - I found out I was barely keeping up. Even then, many classes weren't offered at my schools because there just wasn't the demand and/or sufficient funding (I went to an unusually poor school district - we only went to school 4 days a week because it was so poor). This translated to a very poor transition to entering a very competitive college and a very competitive city life. I grew up not having to work as hard to compete and then suddenly being wildly underprepared for the global market I was entering where most of the people I was working with were from wealthy families, grew up in major cities, and had a world class education at every stage of their life. It's not like all those people had horrible anxiety either... A lot of them were happy at all stages of their life. The ones with the anxiety I think were like me - ones who had never had this much competition and were feeling so far behind.

Now I'm trying to make it but without all the background built up that would help me succeed. It's a lonely path that I don't know any doing on their own. I know one person from a similar background as mine and in the bay area but if they weren't married to an incredible human being - I don't know if they'd be here. Even then, they struggle and they feel it comes back to their more rural roots.

I know living in a city contrary to living in the middle of nowhere really depends on how your kids will be. I would've preferred if I had been living in a city my whole life. Especially as a child to young adulthood. I did everything there is to do while not living in a city. The outdoors with being able to do whatever is nice but the social dynamic of a life in a city is hands down superior than anything imo. Something to consider as it can really be different per individual.

The average income earner could take savings and buy out the flyover people. The city benefits can be hard to quantify. Take quality of healthcare, which you can't be sure when you'll need. More often I see city people stay in the city, and instead just travel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_traveler

On the other hand, in the US, people had been net migrating out of many cities--including today's "elite" cities--until around the late 90s for about the previous 40-50 years. The current idea that young people all want to live in cities is relatively recent. When I graduated from grad school in the mid-80s, essentially no one from my class who went to work in the Boston area actually lived in the city.

I wonder when the country will realize that the rush hour traffic of the nation is a drag on the economy and should be addressed as serious as any emergency.

We need livable towns and cities with good schools where anybody can move anywhere.

Working remotely where practical seems like one fix.

I'm in a very livable town. It's just not walkable given the acres of land with just a few houses around me.

Rush hour traffic is just as bad out in suburbs, and in some ways worse, because the roads are designed for much less congestion.

For comparison, US commute times are close to the shortest among developed countries. I don’t know much about school quality, but most towns and cities in the country allow people to easily get where they want to be.

(source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/521886/travel-time-spent...)

Until COVID-19, the media trend was a relentless attack on suburbs. However long the pandemic lasts, the mass experiment in remote work is likely going to have indelible impacts. Why would profitable companies want to pay big city prices for employee salaries when the evidence for many can be just as or almost as productive using remote workers with much lower cost of living?

> this is all just a temporary thing, even if this pandemic meanders on for another 3-5 years.

The last American urban exodus started in the 1950s and wasn't fully reversed until the early 2000s.

Many cities never recovered in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. Even the most expensive cities, like San Francisco, LA, and New York, had neighborhoods that were run down and dilapidated, ignored for decades, until very recently.

I'm not saying this will necessarily happen again, but it certainly could. Cities are incredibly expensive to maintain, and most American cities have already spent their "rainy day" funds in just a few months of lock-downs. All the while depolicing is gaining steam.

> Cities are incredibly expensive to maintain

The whole thesis of the strongtowns.org website, with lots of data and references to back it up, is that medium dense city centers and town centers are the only parts of a city/town that are revenue positive. Commercial strip mall areas and suburbs do not generate enough sales tax and property tax revenue (and often require tax breaks) to pay for the infrastructure: miles of roads and streets, sewers, utilities, etc. Density, when you have lots of people and economic activity in a smaller area, can pay for its infrastructure, even if it might be more expensive than a country road.

Otherwise, I do agree, it is cyclical, cities were over-hyped for a while, with the tech boom in many east and west coast cities, but now remote work might reverse that. However, as Europe has shown, with a few precautions and some sacrifice such as concerts and night-clubs, a lot of city activities can go on, and with less rent pressure, we might be headed toward a good balance.

You’ve got it backwards. It’s the suburbs that are expensive.

Think about it: one mile of sewer, one mile of street, supports X people in a suburb, or 50X people in a dense city.

Even if the wear costs in the city are double or even four times that, the city comes out way ahead.

https://mikethemadbiologist.com/2016/11/10/meanwhile-u-s-sub...

If at scale, everything is cheaper in cities, why is it local taxes are generally higher within them?

Because we are on the hook for the parasites in the suburbs.

It’s exactly like the paradigm between coastal states and welfare states.

What has changed is near universal availability of high speed wireless. Followed by a national experiment in remote working. You don't have to live in the city to have a lucrative tech job.

How long does the “high paying” part stay true when companies who need technical talent can now pull candidates from the entire world? I wonder if the move towards remote work might wind up pushing down IT wages across the board.

edit: instead of downvoting, maybe help me understand why I might be looking at this wrong?

I did not downvote but timezones, culture, language, skills, etc. are all reasons that companies will not automatically gravitate to the lowest cost areas. Many large companies in tech have global presences that have not resulted in them offshoring all their jobs.

That said, I do expect you see a decrease in premiums being paid for high CoL areas to the degree that living there becomes an employee lifestyle choice and a rise for tech workers in low CoL areas who can work remotely. I expect you end up somewhere in the middle.

I'd respond that low-cost areas, when compared to San Francisco, includes something like 90%+ of America. Presuming all talent must come from the coasts is missing a pretty wide swath of very qualified candidates who speak your language natively, who went to top-flight schools, and who live/work in or near your time zone.

Yes and that's one reason why I would expect to see companies that go more heavily remote hiring preferentially from low cost areas of the US rather than China. (Along with IP laws, etc.) As I say, I'd expect more remote jobs to flatten out tech salaries a bit--especially within the US. Mostly not 100% but if I don't need you to live in the Bay Area, I'm probably not going to pay you extra to live there any more than I'd pay you extra because you want to live in Aspen.

Obviously the post-covid world may be completely different, but my personal anecdata is that my income went up when I went fully remote over a decade ago. Instead of the hand full of local large employers competing for my labor, the whole world is competing for it.

It's important to remember that these economic concepts flow both directions. Power dynamics fluctuate over time, but don't let anyone convince you that you're always on the short end of the stick. You're not.

Plenty of offices will just adopt western hours, like west coast offices do for east coast hours, and plenty of managers will be fine with the dirt cheap shippable code coming out of eastern Europe and Africa in the next few decades as worldwide internet access improves.

On the other hand, I have read about a growing interest in returning to the office. A growing number of people are feeling unproductive working from home. A company could position itself towards shareholders as more productive and innovative with more butts in the seat than it's competitors who outsource. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

Not wrong, but only half right.

A very significant element of comp is about relationships, not skills or productivity or labor markets or other fictions people believe.

In-person relationships are infinitely stronger, on balance, than remote.

Remote talent will be cheaper than in-person talent, on balance, AND, in-person talent will always be comped better than remote.

The way work is structured as tech continues to change will also reflect relationships, and low-relationship roles will continue to see their comp reduced.

So, yes, the range of roles that can be comped less and are remote will grow, creating a much lower median. But in person relationship leverage will only get stronger.

Hope that helps.

This alludes to an important hidden economic downside of being remote: it's tantamount to stalling career progression in the long run.

To a first approximation, niches and margins aside, yes.

They've already had that option for many years. Mass outsourcing of U.S. high skill IT just never materialized. I suspect there's a much greater managerial gulf between Bangalore and New York than between Dubuque Iowa and New York.

Did you pick Dubuque because of the IBM shop there?

There's an IBM shop there?

Anyway, if any HN folks are planning road trips across America, you wouldn't regret passing through that part of the country. Dubuque is in the Driftless Area, a tiny sliver of North America that wasn't covered by glaciers during the last ice age and therefore wasn't scoured flat when they receded. There are lots of steep hills and deep ravines, exposed rock and springs that pop out of the ground for a while and then go back underground. Dubuque sits on a fairly picturesque part of the Mississippi River and has many hills and valleys in town. It even has a funicular!

No - because it sounds like middle-o-nowhere. Pretty cool that it was an apt choice. ;-)

Trump has a travel ban on India through the end of the year and he just ordered Wechat be sold, and He's also sending foreign students back home. You also have, what is very obviously, a puppet ideology infecting people's minds in western countries and the tolerance for that radicalization in many is heading towards zero. As one example, Idaho still has militia units running around keeping the peace.

I think the "good ol' days" of tech companies hiring the best and brightest from around the world to sell exploitive products is over with. If those people want to move here, become US citizens, bring over their immediate family, and rescind their foreign country citizenship great. On the backend of this pandemic, you're going to see a gargantuan backlash against exploitive companies period.

Put your effort into making sure whatever you are doing is efficient and don't get too invested in your current employer.

You don’t have to “rescind your foreign citizenship” to become a US citizen.

Unless something has changed in the past few years, you kind-of-sort-of-maybe need to do that. The US doesn't actually enforce anything like it, but all of my naturalized coworkers were required to surrender their previous passport when they took the oath of US citizenship. The US gives the passport back to the home country. Canada mails it back to you and says you are still Canadian too, while China does not and says you have to get a visa like any other tourist if you ever want to step foot in China again.

Has this changed?

My wife (dual Canadian/US) got her US citizenship 2 years ago. Nothing like what you describe happened.

I appreciate the feedback. My Canadian coworker was naturalized about 5-7 years ago.

I was naturalized about a decade ago and nothing of the sort happened for me either, or for the other two people I know who were naturalized around that time.

The reason is that you are only required to renounce "allegiance" to other countries during the naturalization ceremony. This has nothing to do with citizenship.

> But cities were popular before this, and they'll be popular after this too.

So is country for different people at different times.

Besides I think 'revolt against cities' seems like reaction of this constant bombardment of news about how yuppies love cities and how desolate and terrible life must be for people not living in cities. In last decade I only had one job in city rest all were in burbs. I didn't much care about dining and culture options on my work days. I would think of just getting the hell of out workplace as early as possible and reach home on time. Also exploring city on weekend is always an option.

All things you listed great about city is true. Something I see missing from discussions is what percentage of population really love or afford to access them and with what frequency.

Now as you say cities may be the future for most of the people. Similarly ad economy and constant surveillance also seems to be the future. To me none of these looks to be good.

I guess we'll see how much of that was what you said and how much is "I need to be in the same room as these people to do my work", which won't, or soon won't be true like it was for the past 100+ years.

I'm now a senior engineer with over 10 years experience and I have to be honest, I wouldn't have been the engineer I am today without sitting next to others and learning things, nor would I have been able to mentor people without personal interaction and having them sit and look over my shoulder.

The things is, I work remotely now and have for a while, while I find a lot of pleasure in it, I can see the selfish side of it too.

One important change I've noticed in working for remotes is, we tend to hire experienced people, IMO for the following reason....

We, still don't know how to mentor juniors remotely. This is from an emotional and technical perspective.

I've also never received promotions as a remote person either. I feel there's a long way to go with fully remote workforce being the ideal situation for most people.

This is a revolt against San Francisco in particular though.

Most cities are small, and most city inhabitants dont live on megacities. The whole debate is diviorced from reality as long as this is ignored.

3-5 years is a long time relative to the span of a human life. I live in NYC; let's say that the reduction of city-life benefits in NYC is temporary, and it will be back to 2019 standards in 5 years (this is not an unbelievable assertion). Should I stick around for 5 years and wait it out? Why? 5 years is enough time for me to pay off an entire house in most parts of the country. I can always move back. I believe in the huge advantages cities provide; it's why I moved here in the first place. I don't feel any loyalty towards a geographic location though.

I'm interested in the romantic allure you mention.

I love cities, but I always wonder if the combination of a high speed internet, plenty of space and fresh air, solar electricity, and a good electric car to go to town in weekends, wouldn't be better.