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.
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.
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.
If that value is going to be captured by anyone, I would much MUCH rather it be captured by Google shareholders, many of whom are employees and are at least partly responsible for the company's incredible success, than lazy and parasitic SFBA landlords who profit from their own NIMBYism and regulatory predation.
If you're working remotely for 100k, and paying 1.7k a month in rent, you're capturing ~80k as well. That means more capital is going to the employers(who saves 40k) at the expense of the landlords (who lose out on that 40k).
I honestly think I'd rather have the capital go to the employers because a) it improves my value in relation to them (I now can argue that I should get paid more, because I bring in 40k a year more value than I did in SV) AND I have a financial interest in the company doing well (with options/RSUs/bonuses/etc).
The money going to the landlords starts to become very literally "rent seeking" where they will capture the capital without providing any productivity gains in return. You could argue that their value in "provide a location for people to live so they can collaborate more effectively" is decreasing with remote work, and they will have to charge less because the value they provide is decreasing.
It most certainly is, if at the same time you're hanging out at city council meetings protesting construction and housing development. The cost of housing in SFBA isn't really the cost of land - its the cost of regulation. It's the marginal cost of building new housing.
Additionally, labor has a say in what they're paid as well and knowledge of what the average pay is for a given job in their country, region, or city. They can also talk to their fellow employees when they're hired and then push for a hire wage when they find out they're making less then everyone else doing the same job. Just because someone lives in Wisconsin doesn't mean they just accept any offer at a discount simply because HR has a bar chart says they should be paid 35% less then someone else.
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?
Not to mention, the top companies would still hire top talent in a competitive market.
The truth is, no matter where you are, talent knows what talent is worth. We price accordingly and in the end the market is stable at a certain price level.
We’ve been seeing this over the last decade in major US cities competing for SF-level talent. Tech is one of the highest paid professions. Remote or otherwise. To say companies will just go hire someone cheaper assumes they can find someone cheaper.
In the end I think the real winners are rural America (or Europe or where ever you live). Having a lifeblood of capital come back to small towns and the like will decentralize our cities, improve our quality of life, reinforce the need for infrastructure, and allow innovation to solve those problems.
Exciting times.
This is a pipe dream and quite conceited. Talent is worth what the market will pay for it. No escaping supply and demand. If you no longer need to be in the office, the labor pool is immensely expanded. Unless you think that all the smart people in the world were already working for SF employers.
And I don't think it's SV -> Rural America exclusively. Many of these jobs will filter back into medium to large sized metros across the country. Places like Columbus, Indianapolis, St Louis, Atlanta, Nashville, etc. . There are scores of talented developers in these areas that would be open to remote work, but not relocation to the major metro areas.
From what I can tell, people are actually mostly moving to other tech hubs (but lower priced) and to high end vacation areas. Think Austin, Denver, Park City Utah, Lake Tahoe, etc... The underlying dynamics are still at play (even tech but to a lesser extent).
It makes me uncomfortable to think tech population from Ca descending onto unsuspecting laid back mid western towns. Integration should be gentle and respectful and with consent.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoUtoqeEw8U
you can excuse the resentment
I don’t have a comment or solution to this problem (is it even a problem?) otherwise I’d suggest something. I’m just observing like others, but I will admit to browsing Zillow for a farm if remote work has staying power. I think being able to provide some stimulus economically from this will help those smaller rural businesses. I don’t know. I’m not qualified in economics to predict the outcome, only some hope and some fear of possibilities.
You can hire competent Thai or Vietnamese programmers for $20K/year on Upwork, which is a princely sum in their countries. If all you want is someone to implement a spec, they'll do the job just as good or better than any American. Why would you pay $100K/year?
Most markets bifurcate into a commoditized low-end that makes all the volume and a differentiated high-end that makes all the profits. Think Android/iPhone, Windows/Mac, TSMC/Intel, Volkswagon/Porsche, etc. The commodity low-end programmer isn't the guy in Missouri, it's the guy in Minsk or Bangkok. You're either the one making up the specs (which will probably still be in Silicon Valley, because that requires communication and trust more than coding ability), or the one implementing the specs (which can be anywhere, with commensurate wages).
So it would follow that overpriced talent in high-demand markets would see a decrease, where underpriced talent in low-demand markets would see an increase.
This would be the same concerns with offshoring as well, but that hasn't led to massive salary drops. Because there's still a big cost to switching people. If you could fire all your SF SWEs today and replace them with identical, knowledgable, fully-ramped, culture-carried SWEs in $secondary_market for half price, you would. You can't, so you threaten and you try to convince your SF SWE that you could just enough to keep their expectations low, but not so much that they actually quit.
I see a lot of companies still trying the "CoLA trick" on employees moving to secondary markets. "We can hire your position in $market for cheaper," so the argument goes. The best move there is to call their bluff: "go do it then". Most people won't do it because a) conflict is hard and b) finding a new job on top of moving is annoying. So they'll take it on the chin and just resign 6-12 months later after they're settled.
[1] In the old world, there's still a premium to convince talent to relocate. So companies in high-demand markets (e.g., SF) either have to pay +x% to tap non-local talent and get them to move to the high-demand market (where they become local talent).
Even in the new world, non-local talent isn't going to sit by and let themselves be underpaid. "I'm doing the exact same thing, delivering the exact same value, but someone is getting paid 30% more to sit in the office? Oh, and you don't even pay for my home office?"
Anyone working for a Silicon Valley company as an engineer is almost certainly considered "the wealthy" by most of America.
Depending on your definition of wealthy, "anyone working" full stop. A large number of americans do not work (too young/old etc). Others are sick. Many at the top of society don't earn much income (tax voodoo). And automation is coming. If we define "wealthy" as the top 25/15/10% of wage earners, how soon before that is basically just anyone with a fulltime job?
In 2020, $121,411 was the median household net worth in the United States. This is up from $97,225.55 in 2017.
The average household net worth in 2020 was $746,821. It was $692,100 in 2017.
The disparity between these two numbers is itself a major problem, but not the point. If you have a net work of $120k you aren't wealthy, even if you earnt that all in the last month.
The way you get from having no wealth to having an average amount is by working harder and earning more. However the tax system is built to punish people who earn more money from work, and reward people who gain more wealth through things like capital gains -- you pay more tax if you increase your wealth by a dollar from working than from the side-effect of being already wealthy and seeing your assets gain value. You're also far more likely to have higher outgoings if you're working (higher cost to live near a high paying job, commuting costs etc)
If you are on the median ohio wage on 37k a year, so $30,427.47 net, and spending 37k to live, your wealth doesn't increase.
If you work an extra 1k, you take home $31,202.47 -- $775, 22.5% tax.
If you make 1k in capital gains, you keep $971, 3% tax.
Look at twice median wage of 74k a year. Take home 57,439.49. Extra $1k will give you 58,109.69, an extra $670 - 33% tax.
Make 1k in capital gains and you pay 18% tax.
Earn 10 times the median wage at $370k and you keep 239,713.20, 42% tax.
Get 1k in capital gains and you keep $764, 24% tax.
https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/
https://www.thebalance.com/breakdown-of-average-monthly-hous...
https://goodcalculators.com/us-salary-tax-calculator/ohio/
https://smartasset.com/investing/capital-gains-tax-calculato...
When you consider just how low US individual income tax rates are by global standards, it’s obvious that disparities in net worth have a lot to do with the fact that a large share of Americans, regardless of their income, effectively choose to live from paycheck to paycheck on the brink of personal insolvency.
But often these arguments don't present a full picture - because it only discusses the end result of the dollar received and compare the tax rates.
What about the risk? A job-income is 100% guaranteed to be received if one worked. Even if the business paying the said wage doesn't make a profit, they still have to pay the wage. The owner cops the loss.
Therefore, to encourage investments, the taxes are lowered on the profits of such type of investment (which is what capital gains are). The person trying to make capital gains income has to take on a risk that a wage earner doesn't, because the capital gains aren't guaranteed.
If capital gains are taxed the same, you will find that there will be less investments, which leads to less jobs and less wealth overall.
So you're saying people don't work because they are taxed at a higher rate than capital gains?
Higher capital gains tax discourages investment. If income tax is higher, it indeed does stop people from working (as much). But we are talking about raising capital gains tax, not raising income tax.
The person risking "billions" in capital is taking "billions" in monetary risk (the weighting depending on what the investment is - bonds are less risky than shares, for example).
Over the last 50 years the values of investments have far far outpaced growth in earnings. If a millionaire doesn't invest and make captial gains, what does he do with his money? Keep it in a box under the bed?
And a lawyer gets paid $200/hr. What are you comparing? I'm not talking about whether it's "fair" that someone can be earning so little when there exists billionairs. That's for the philosophers and social commentators to endless debate.
But someone working for $20/hr earns that money, with zero risk of not receiving it after services rendered. Someone investing money is not guaranteed a return.
> If a millionaire doesn't invest and make captial gains, what does he do with his money?
So you're saying that because said millionaire has "no choice", he would be forced to invest and thus, society could leech more off him?
Same principle with a lawyer being paid $200 an hour, or an actor on $2000 an hour.
Morally I'd say that the millionaire who is rent seeking should be taxed more than those working, but parity would be a start
You make investing seem like gambling. Seems that the IRS treat gambling as earned income, not unearned income.
Yes, but it is not good that your "compensation" will be coming from something that isn't tied to your job performance. Wages at least have some tenuous connection to how well you perform at work.
> 2. Maybe the money will go to new hires, capabilities, expenditures, etc. ?
Based on recent trends, this will not happen.
> 3. Sure, but this is certainly a good arguing point against immigration, population growth and H1-B visa programs and the like.
Yes, definitely.
> 4. Increase taxes on the wealthy, etc.
Yes, or nationalize the banks.
It also doesn't account for the fact that these equities can lose substantial value, or may be over-valued.
> Yes, or nationalize the banks.
Re-implement the Glass-Steagall Act, or similar. Nationalization leaves the levers of power in the hands of the wrong people. Keeping commercial and investment banking separate while implementing strong consumer protections was shown to work well in the past. Also, it has shown that the repeal massively reduced the amount of banks (killing competition) so it stands to reason that trend could be reversed and improve the consumer banking experience over time.
This won’t work. When the tech exodus begins, it’s going to cause CA to buckle at its knees because the wealthy has been subsidizing more than 80% of the population. It is not sustainable or healthy at all to suckle at the teat of the wealthy.
We should abolish all taxes and only retain taxes based on consumption. And a flat modest capital gains tax. With dedications gone, this might actually bring in more public money.
Public spending will also decrease if we figure a way out of unfunded pension liabilities. This is huge. Don’t know how it can be resolved.
CA does not tax wealth, they tax (predominately) income, and I wouldn't be so quick to equate the 2. Prop 13, for example, can mean that wealthy land owners pay almost nothing in tax if they've owned their property for a long time.
https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/ generally the wealthier you are the bigger your tax cut.
Yes, and I also see the push for remote work also affecting the demand side of the software labor market as well as the supply. There will be even more push for good collaboration/communication work process software. It's still a fast growing market.
I can tell you there's a reason I left Texas and it's because cash doesn't do to your savings what RSU's and bonuses will.
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.
That was my experience at an F500 in the midwest. I wasn't a senior engineer but I was doing the same type of work as the seniors on my team. And I felt like my role could have more ownership. They did have team leads, a few architects, and agile related roles. But there wasn't much else for devs who didn't want to be managers.
My current company in the bay area is a lot better. I feel like I have more ownership, and the IC roles are more granular. I think technically senior can be terminal, and staff/principal roles here require influencing other teams. But my company has thought about promoting ICs, and I clearly see how staff/principals have a more challenging job.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is more than accessible to tech workers at public companies. A 150k income is going to be ~7k a month after taxes. Tier one employers pay significantly more than that to new grads, and pretty much everyone reputable in the bay pays more than that to experienced people. So yeah, single income can absolutely afford a home.
Obviously someone with student loans can't do that as quickly, but otoh a dual income family could put $2M down in cash before they turn 30 given moderate success. (Or another way of looking at this is a moderately successful mid-20s SWE can bank 100k/yr after all expenses and retirement savings, without budgeting strictly. That's ridiculous)
A SWE in their 20s banking $100k a year? Must be nice.
Google, Amazon (and subsidiaries like Twitch), Microsoft (and subsidiaries like Github), Facebook, Linkedin, Stripe, Square, Lyft, Uber, Snap, Oracle, Apple, Dropbox, Box, Nvidia, Twitter, Slack, Salesforce, ByteDance and a slew of others. And I'm including only companies that pay out 150K in cash equivalents (cash + annual bonus + liquid stock) in that list.
After a promotion, that list probably doubles in size.
> What new grad making $150k is going to qualify for a loan on a million dollar house?
I don't think I ever suggested this. What I did suggest is that someone who graduates at 22 or 23 (and, with the big caveat that they do so with little to no existing debt), gets a 150K starting comp, and has even a modest amount of career growth will be able to save a whole bunch of money in their late twenties.
> A SWE in their 20s banking $100k a year? Must be nice.
Like I said, its absolutely ridiculous.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've spent decades among software people and never heard this said.
The outsourcing to India etc is 2+ decades old already FFS! What impact it's had on US wages is hard to say, but it's been very good for a lot of third world engineers!
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's great news for non-Americans though, USD goes a long way in a lot of the world.
Zoom hasn't fixed this.
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.
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.
If only there was some kind of organization in which tech workers could "unify".
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.
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!
EDIT: Here are a few more things to like about Sacramento.
There seems to be a large population of highly educated ex-military types concentrated here. It’s been an unexpected source of high quality hires. I never saw these people in the Bay.
I’m in an international marriage. We were worried we wouldn’t be able to find our people upon moving here. That hasn’t been a problem at all. Fellow expats are everywhere. It’s a fairly diverse area.
I mean, it's not cold once you get outside of SF/San Bruno. If you're in the peninsula or south bay, it's really fucking hot during the summer. Uncomfortably hot because no one has AC and many of the homes don't have insulation still.
I'm sure the renter to owner market in Sacramento is different than the bay area...
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.
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.
Other than easy access to nature, all of those points are true for major metro areas. But other than say, Salt Lake City, does any other metro area offer such close access to nature? Boston and Seattle are even much farther away...
I am a pretty avid nature enthusiast that spends a lot of time in the outdoors. It isn't even close, whether you are looking for mountains, water, or parks. Seattle's reputation in this regard is well-deserved; I'm not sure if there is another metro of its size that is so embedded in and connected to nature. And if you look at map, it is easy to see why -- the city is essentially surrounded by water that is surrounded by very rugged mountains (which has provided challenges for growth).
FWIW, the other large metros in the Pacific Northwest (definitely Vancouver and to a lesser extent Portland) have similarly exceptional access to nature. Some of the Mountain West cities also have great access to nature, though not as diverse as Seattle.
Camelback Mountain is half an hour from the center of Phoenix. Virginia Key Beach Park's walking trails are 20 minutes from downtown Miami. Lionel Hampton-Beecher Hills Park is about the same distance from Atlanta. You get the idea.
SF certainly has really nice nature close by, but it's not like other US cities are industrial wastelands.
I'll grant you the Santa Cruz Mountains if you're on the southern end of the Bay. You've also got the hills in the East Bay and various options in Marin and points north if you're in Marin.
But Boston, in addition to various coastal walks has a bunch of nearby parks and small mountains/hills to the west and in southern NH. Also tons of sea kayaking/canoeing. Depending upon where you live, bigger peaks in NH are maybe 2-3 hours.The Sierras are further than that from the SFBA.
Don't get me wrong. The Bay Area has great recreational options but so do a lot of other cities depending upon what you're looking for.
I grew up in suburban Boston. It was a very nice town - we lived on an acre of land, with woods behind the house. Drive 30 minutes in any direction, and you got basically - woods. Maybe some ponds and fields, with scattered houses and suburban town centers between. The city (a pretty nice one) was 30 minutes away. You could get to waterfront, in Boston or Salem or Nahant, but there aren't really beaches in most of Massachusetts (outside of Cape Cod). It did have a massive amount of history, though - in that 30 minute drive was basically everywhere significant to the birth of the USA.
I'm on the peninsula now, in the hills. 10 minute walk to a suburban downtown. 3 minute drive (or ~20 minute walk) and we're on some Bay trails. 5 minute drive and we're in the mountains. 5 minute drive to a massive lake over the San Andreas. 20 minute drive and we're on the beach at the Pacific Ocean. 30 minute drive (or 40 minute Caltrain) and we're up in SF. 30 minute drive and we're in downtown San Jose.
Define "easy access to nature." Where I live, there's a major state park within the city limits and a very large lake within ~20 minutes drive. In ~2 hours I can be at the beach. In ~3-4 hours I can be in the mountains. And untold amounts of basically empty land just outside the city. If you're going to arbitrarily define "easy access to nature" as "mountains next to ocean right next to me", well OK, not a lot of places fit that bill. But that's a very narrow definition designed to fit basically SV.
I can go see thousands of migratory birds a few miles from my apartment. Half Moon Bay is 30-45 minutes away, depending on road conditions. Fairly strenuous hiking and rock-climbing in the Santa Cruz Mountains is also 30-60 minutes away. Santa Cruz itself is not much farther.
I have lived all over the east coast for most of my life, and this degree of access has made an outdoors person of my notoriously sedentary self.
So can I, as I mentioned there's a major state park within the city limits where I live...
> It means I can see a beautiful view without planning a day trip.
Incredibly vague and subjective. What constitutes a "beautiful view"?
> I can meet with groups of friends of all fitness levels and enjoy a pleasant afternoon outdoors where we all have fun.
Not unique to the SF Bay Area at all.
Again I think this is very much a cherry-picked definition of "easy access to nature" that is designed to preclude any place not named "SF Bay Area." Still, the kinds of things you were describing can be found in metro areas all over the country.
This is all subjective, of course, but what can I say? I've been in restaurant and bars at the top of tall hotels in Milwaukee, I enjoyed it and the view of the lake and city... and no, I don't think it even remotely measures up to views of the bay from Pacific Heights or another dozen views in San Francisco. Nor does the surrounding countryside in Milwaukee - which I sincerely do like quite a bit - measure up to redwood forests, Pt. Reyes, the headlands, the coastline from SF to Santa Cruz. A little farther afield, Big Sur and the high Sierras, Sonoma and Napa valleys. I'm not really even sure how to debate it with people, it seems so self-evident to me. California and SF have some really bad qualities, but no, it's not all six of one and a half dozen of the other around any randomly selected US city of 100K in the US. The nature around San Francisco is a differentiator and a selling point (though I would tend to agree that it is now officially overpriced).
Puget Sound is remarkable, though, and the forest around Portland is beautiful. As I've mentioned in another thread, though, the coast is far more accessible in San Francisco.
If you were to take access to nature to mean, being within driving distance of nature sites that people travel across the country to experience, then the number of metro areas drops significantly.
The Appalachian mountain range stretches from GA to Maine, and contains dozens of state and national parks that people travel across the country to see. Nearly the entire eastern seaboard is within range of one of them.
The only part that isn’t is Florida, and they have better beaches than California, swamps, lakes, and massive crystal clear springs.
But if you start narrowing it to places with pleasant weather, suddenly it starts looking like a smaller picture. The west coast, west of the cascades or central valley in CA. Probably places like the Carolinas, Tennessee. And maybe we'll be nice to Colorado and give them a trophy for at least having sunshine in the winter :)
You don't have to pay SF rents, of course, but you're not buying a $100k mansion and getting all of these things either.
Most suburbs of decent sized cities on the east coast have 2 day Amazon shipping, even the ones close to national parks. And the mail works fine in basically any suburban area.
For variety, I actually think the LA area as a whole is better. But it has the same problem.
Looking at air travel - Denver to India or Austin to China - everything is a 1 day+ and over $2000+. SF/LA to these places is about 15 hours and about $1500.
If the business (i.e. Apple/Google making phones) needs to fly execs, production folks as well as if the tech engineers need in person meetings or have family, that's going to be a made much more challenging.
Also from AUS, you have Houston and Dallas as two big airport options to get to China.
People I know dislike the fact that most of SV is a typical suburb indistinguishable from what you see in any random Florida city. And consider how many busses bring workers from their apartments in SF down to the office in the burbs.
Maybe there’s something you’re not explaining here but there’s plenty of places all over the country that fit this bill. Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Denver, etc.
And Amazon 2 day delivery is available all over the place...
Have you been to Atlanta? It doesn't seem like you're familiar.
The Beltline [0,1], a paved multi-use trail converted from old railway, encircles the city's major neighborhoods and connects everything. It's one of the city's major features. Dozens of parks, including some of the largest -- Piedmont [2], Old Forth Ward, Grant Park, and the old Bellwood Quarry [3] where they filmed Walking Dead, It, etc. -- are all immediately accessible.
The Beltine is being connected to the Silver Comet Trail [4,5], which is a paved bike trail stretching all the way to Alabama (the nation's second longest). Light rail is also being added to the Beltline.
Outside the city you've got access to the Chattahoochee River for rafting. The Palisades [6] provide excellent river-adjacent hiking.
Stone Mountain [7], a giant granite mountain, is 30 minutes east of the city and provides excellent hiking and running.
Kennesaw Mountain [8] is 30 minutes northwest of the city and is great for hiking and dog walking.
Red Top Mountain is 40 minutes northwest, and you have a host of lower Appalachian mountains to the north.
Allatoona Lake [9] is 40 minutes northwest, where they filmed Ozark, and provides excellent boating. Lake Lanier is an hour away and is even bigger.
Atlanta isn't called "city in the forest" for nothing. We have so many trees, parks, and outdoor activities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeltLine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmont_Park
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westside_Reservoir_Park
[4] https://www.silvercometga.com/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Comet_Trail
[6] https://www.atlantatrails.com/hiking-trails/hiking-east-pali...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain
> easily accessible nature
From my office in Palo Alto, I can ride my bicycle up Sand Hill Road, past horse farms, and then up a secluded 2000 ft (~600 meters) mountain with virtually no traffic and return during my lunch break. Or I can take a long lunch and ride out to the coast, through rolling farmlands. And I can do that virtually any day of the year, thanks to the local climate.
Most of the peninsula (which is, arguably, not SV proper) is like this, with tons of hiking within walking distance of where you live or work. The reason is that almost everything west of I-280 is undeveloped. As you ride or drive around that area, it's very easy to find a view where the only sign of humans is the road you're traveling on.
If I want to go skiing, I can leave work an hour early and drive up to Tahoe for the weekend. Or I could drive down to Santa Cruz for the day and go surfing.
Not quite "nature", but many people like to drive up to Napa for a day-trip to visit world-class wineries.
> luxury retail
Then, after work, I can walk over to my choice of Michelin starred restaurants (and I will pass multiple art galleries and branches of private banks). Granted, none of the restaurants in Palo Alto have more than one Michelin star (how gauche!).
If conspicuous consumption is your thing, San Mateo, Palo Alto, and Santa Clara each have high-end malls with practically every luxury brand you can imagine. Want to buy Ferrari or a McLaren? There's a dealer for each one within 10 miles of Mountain View.
> plenty of places all over the country that fit this bill
Many places have some of what SV offers. Very very few have everything, and I would argue that none of the cities you listed fit the bill.
Ah, but all of them have more affordable housing.
I'm the one that started this discussion and it proved controversial. I tried to just talk about like, the amenities of living in the area and tech jobs, but most people replied saying "wait there's two or three of your list of five or six in...".
I may be biased because I'm not a "generalist web developer", I work in either crazy startups or kinda niche embedded/low level roles. I still get two or three really good job offers from big companies per month even when I'm not looking and they are in SV. I was getting one or more per week pre-COVID. Even when actively looking for that type jobs in Colorado and Austin I can't find them.
Colorado would be more interesting for me if I was a citizen and could work the government aerospace and defense jobs but unfortunately I can't.
The premise was that there are lots of other places that have what SV has. And, by implication, that SV's high prices are unjustified.
I was merely pointing out that SV has an array of amenities that are found together in very few other places. And if you want what SV has, there are very few other places you can get it. Supply and demand. It's that simple.
Maybe you don't care about fancy restaurants or art galleries or spending time outdoors. That's totally cool. Maybe all you care about is finding the absolute cheapest apartment on planet earth. Again, knock your socks off.
SV doesn't have cheap housing. If that's all you care about, look someplace else.
Of course, the grass is always greener. But I think natives are entitled to grouse a little bit, given the circumstances. It's just a little scary if this is the best the U.S. has to offer.
"Despising, For you, the city, thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere."
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.
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.
In my estimation, it has the most coolness-per-dollar. What I actually want is to buy a house, and I just can’t do that around here. Austin is comparatively cheaper and has a culture that appeals to me. It feels a lot like California, but without much of the baggage.
Parts of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington are also strong contenders, but I am predisposed to like Texas.
And who’s full? The main thing the flyover states need is more people.
It's the NIMBY anti-change response to policy.
The people that want a strong economy, incentivize building housing, and adapting lead to positive non-zero-sum outcomes.
The people that say "fuck off we're full" block any policy and create perverse incentives that create a dysfunctional mess.
This is ignoring the selection bias that the people leaving now are probably also the people not interested in CA anti-housing, high-tax policy and would likely be a better fit on these policy issues in Austin than the commenter thinks.
Largely I think comments like the one you replied to are just responding to what they see as the enemy tribe in the political culture war.
Sure everyone's land is worth more (as if selling the home you own or the land your business is on is actually an option when you can't readily replace either) but at the end of the day but everything winds up inflated and your standard of living flat-lines or decreases despite the increased stress.
One guess I'd have is that an influx of new people creates that anti-housing response anywhere which can lead to some of the same problems. I suspect that's less about CA policy and more about bad incentives around housing being an investment in the US.
If you mean that most people from CA don't like Trump (or the Republican support/defense of him), then yeah I think you're probably right about that (but that's not really CA policy). A lot of people I work with are more center or center-right than the general narrative about Californians would have you believe, I'd suspect those leaving to be more from that camp.
What people don't like is that when upper middle class city and inner suburb types move in local ordinances that restrict what you can and can't do on your own land seem to always follow. And given a generation or so of change in that direction, it gets you the same overpriced, impossible to develop hellscape that those people were seeking to flee in the first place. This isn't unique to CA. Their stupidity isn't special. This pattern has played out all over the east coast and midwest.
1 - anti-housing like you say. You see lots of signs in my neighborhood wishing against more-dense housing, despite (relatively) astronomical pricing. At least in Seattle, we do have an issue where we're constrained by water so there isn't a lot of places to build that aren't very far out. So density really is the only solution if you're going to keep computes reasonable. The only people who can afford to buy the existing not-dense housing have a ton of money or income (or both). A >$1m SFH is just not affordable in a city where median household income is $100k.
2 - push against increasing property tax. Sort of a corollary to the housing bit. Which gets doubly odd because we have no income tax in WA. Weirdly regressive.
3 - the strange and ineffectual CA-style push against "assault rifles" as the main item of gun control, despite the fact that all rifles nation-wide kill ~300/yr while pistols kill 30,000/yr, 10k of which are homicide. I say ineffectual because Amdahl's law is a thing, so even if you did magically disappear all riles in the country, it would have a ~1% impact on gun violence.
4 - restaurants heating the out of doors. This spiked a lot with coronavirus so it's hard to talk about now. (This might also be me projecting because I myself am an implant from the Midwest (yes I am a hypocrite), and heating the out of doors is just complete insanity to me)
5 - Many more good restaurants in general though. Sadly, still not a lot of good mexican restaurants.
6 - a change in coffee styles. Take from that what you will, people are kinda religious about it here.
It's really hard to pick out what's actually influenced by CA implants, vs what is just homegrown.
But it is crazy inefficient to pump heat into the outdoors. It's not as inefficient in most parts of california, even northern california. But when you move north it gets down under 40... (In the Midwest where it gets below 0, it's complete lunacy)
It's a weird thing to be simultaneously in favor of environmental controls and trying to raise awareness for climate change (and doing things in Seattle like banning the use of natural gas for heating?), while also being totally ok with heating the outside for dining.
The real problems I see are more cultural ones. Homelessness is rising (as it is throughout the US). Utah had handled homelessness much better than other places due to a unique balance between the local government, the police, and the LDS church (I'm not a member FYI), but changes in the mayor and chief of police disrupted that balance.
I also perceive an arrogance on the part of some of those moving here. The idea that they can just start changing things without understanding how/why things were the way they were before. I don't think I'm against change--it's impossible to stop it in any case--but I also don't think coastal values are right for every area.
Not exactly a novel proposition. The Europeans who arrived in what is now New England, or the Caribbean or yes, even Utah, felt much the same and acted like it too.
It's not like most of the SFBA fleeing refugees here were natives. They were kids from schools MI, NY, PA, IL and TX. The Menlo Park, Mountain View equivalents entrenched in West Austin are pretty fed up already so we'll see how it all turns out in 5 -10 years as the nextgen 3.0 descend on Silicon Hills.
The ACT stuff is long-overdue and the new CapMetro Connect project is great. Hopefully it gets funded and built with fewer bumps along the way than Houston's 5-line rail network (which is still sitting at only 3-and-a-half of 5 lines built).
I looked around, I found a place I like, to I settled there and I want it to stay this way.
He's in the set of people he's complaining about.
[Edit: Apparently not Austin, but some other place - point still stands]
France has taxes around 45% of GDP, California has (including all levels, including federal) around 30%, the US as a whole (again, counting all levels) is around 25%. California is one of the higher overall tax jurisdictions in the US, but unless your argument is that the US as a whole has unreasonably low taxes, I don't get how you can say California makes France look reasonable.
Only for a little over 4 decades.
> don't make enough money to pay taxes,
Yeah, let's just say my household income is in the top 10% in the state, so no.
> or are just being cussed.
If by “being cussed” you mean “understand the difference between total tax rates and top end marginal income tax rates in a progressive tax system”, then, yes it must be this one.
If not, you've missed at least one important possibility.
> The US top end tax rate is 37%, plus California is .... what? 13? You're already up to giving away half of what you make in California.
If you make enough in regular income that essentially all of your income is taxed at the maximum marginal federal and state, sure.
But virtually no one does that , one, because, first, you have to make a huge amount of income for that to be the case, and, second, if you make enough income for that to be the case, you probably have plenty of opportunity to structure how you make income so that, again, it's not. (Of course, while France’s top marginal income tax rate is “only” 45%, it makes a lot more of it's revenue from non-regular-income taxes than anyplace in the US, with a 20% standard VAT rate and a 42.2% top tax rate, including surtaxes and social charges, on capital gains.)
> Meanwhile you have to pay taxes on physical property like your house, and your house is valued at 7 figures if you live in the Bay Area
You don't have to pay full-value on the house except in the year you bought it, assuming market appreciation of > 2%/annum because prop 13.
> Finally, there was a VAT the last time I lived there
There has never been a VAT in any part of California. There is a sales tax, which is not a VAT, which is not a VAT, and the maximum sales tax rate in the state is 10.25%.
There are other HN users with fire-breathing powers and formidable writing skills whom we eventually persuaded not to post in the enemy-incinerating style here. The argument boils down to trying to have a site that remains at least moderately interesting. There exist communities in which members kick the shit out of each other (or let's be nice, out of opposing arguments) and are higher-quality for it. I like to compare this to rugby teams who beat each other up and then go out drinking together: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
HN can't work this way because it's much too big and incohesive—the average quality of contribution is much lower, and there are no relational ties to mitigate the downside. If people start posting in that style here, a copycat stampede will result, only without any insight or wit. We'll end up with mass battles on scorched earth, which is interesting to none of the users that we actually want to have here. Trying to stave off that fate for as long as possible is actually the founding idea behind HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html, https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
No, the sales tax is called sales tax. VAT and sales tax are structurally different.
> it's the highest in the US, FWIIW.
That's true if you talk exclusively of the state-only rate, which makes no sense to use as the basis of comparison; for statewide average combined state and local sales tax rate (the average rate people actually pay for sales tax in the State), California is #9, behind liberal utopias like Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama, among others. (Not only is California not the highest for average combined state and local sales tax, it's nowhere close to the highest for peak combined state and local sales tax, that is, the maximum people actually have to pay; the source I have doesn't rank this way, but from inspection it looks like Illinois with a statewide 6.25% and a peak local additional of 10.00% is the top there.)
If you're a poor person, you'd (probably) rather have a cheap home in a poor city surrounded by other poor people, than be the poor person stuck in a gentrifying neighborhood which is getting increasingly hostile to your presence.
Specifically, the cost of land is what causes the cost to build to be so high. Owning unproductive land is cheap, and incentivizes simply holding onto it until it appreciates sufficiently.
I think it's a lot more nuanced than that but the sentiment is at the very least understandable.
On a personal note, it's been tons of fun competing with the multiple bids, sight unseen, over asking on 600-700k+ century old homes in need of another 100k worth of rehab.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2018/11/09/native-t...
Maybe there is hope? Not likely but who knows
Actually being from SF, I have never once given any transplant any shit (mostly because at any given party I am the only local).
It would never occur to me to be nativist in my own country, how does this shit fly elsewhere?
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.
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.