Exactly. The Bay Area in particular bitches and moans about "lack of talent" but has such hiring myopia that only a few companies can see talent that is more than 50 miles away.

I once had a co-worker (who lives inside the San Francisco city limits) say: "San Jose? Why would I ever drive that far south?! As for as I'm concerned, San Jose is Southern California." He was serious.

So? Nobody who lives in SF would drive themselves to San Jose every day. The traffic is insane. You would kill 3-4 hours a day easily.

Hence the point that companies (say in San Jose) should allow remote work to attract employees in SF.

Sorry, I should have connected the dots to the parent comment. It means he wasn't interested in recruiting new hires from San Jose or anywhere else that wasn't a short commute into the city... unless of course, they agreed to move.

Because it would be a bad hire. Those 50 miles are at least a 90 minute drive each way most of the day.

Of course a 90 minute commute is a horrible idea. So why would they have to drive? Why couldn't they work from home? If code is checked into GitHub and deployed to cloud servers, why are we requiring new hires to work in the SF office every day? (That was my point.)

ah, I understand

you're preaching to the choir

:-) I could have also mentioned that this particular co-worker had influence over recruiting and office policies...

It could take 2+ hours to commute from SF to SJ during rush hour.

I can't help but feel part of this is due to the fact that SF/NYC salaries are really great if you live somewhere with a cheaper cost of living. Developers have significant amount of leverage in this situation.

I don't think this is necessarily conscious; I just think that businesses sense a power differential that comes with remote work: part of it being a tacit acknowledgement that this really expensive area is not the best place ever for talent, part of it being that this employee has a much better living situation comparatively, and part of it being that not seeing them in person regularly means less warm fuzzies for management.

Progressive minded businesses make it work by realizing that empowered workers produce better work. Everyone else hobbles by doing what everyone else does to stay into the warm blanket we call groupthink (aka 'best practices').

I don't know about that; not only have I worked for companies in other cities that refused to consider remote work, I've worked for several NYC companies that were happy to give workers a day or two per week of work-from-home time.

"doesn't come from next door" indicates to me that with "remote work" the GP doesn't mean a day or two per week, but 100% remote.

I'm just wondering where this mythical place is that will pay regular full-time wages for employees who never step foot in the office.

I used to have a job like that - I never visited the head office. In fact, I was never even in the same city.

And then there are the jobs were you work remote with a week of office time every couple of months. Still a far cry from "working a day or two a week from home".

http://weworkremotely.com/ claims to be a directory of mythical places :-)