If you draw a circle 50 miles in diameter around LA, SF, NYC, Boston, and DC: basically anywhere outside of those circles in the mainland US is pretty reasonable. It's not just the rust belt, really. You can live in Miami, Seattle or Chicago and do just fine.
You're going to have to include Seattle in the "expensive" set either now or very soon. New homes are going for millions. But other than that, agreed, just go outside the commuting range of all the major hubs and it's cheap!
For that matter, I live about 40 miles outside of Boston/Cambridge and housing prices are pretty reasonable. Yeah, the commute in is a pain if you work in the city (although there's decent commuter rail service). But if you don't have to work in the city (I don't), there's reasonable housing within a distance that lets you go into the city for an evening.
I think some of those other locations (SF in particular) probably have a bigger radius but a lot of the angst about housing prices turns out to apply to very specific urban locales. And new grads were complaining about the price of crappy Manhattan apartments at least since the 80s.
Commuting outside of areas well-served by public transportation is a huge detriment to quality-of-life. Those extra hours really add up, especially during the shorter days of winter. The advantage of moving to a second or third city is that you can still enjoy the amenities of an urban or semi-urban setting at a lower price point. It doesn't even have to be in the Rust Belt (although personally I like Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Cleveland a great deal) - Raleigh and Charlotte are still affordable for people who like that area and climate. And there are any number of small towns in VT, NH, CO, UT, upstate NY, or central MA for the outdoorsy who don't need an urban setting
That assumes you like cities. I don't dislike cities in general but I also like my rural property. I honestly don't see a particular advantage to small towns. What I like about cities is things like theater, good restaurants, and related culture which typically take significant scale.
Not sure what extra hours you're talking about. I have a modest (25 min or so) commute when I go into the (suburban/exurban) office and frequently work remotely. I can't say I miss depending on public transit though I use it when I am in a city.
Not sure if it's what he was referring to, but when I was able to commute on public transit my commute was longer but I was free to do other things during that time, primarily reading. Now that I live somewhere without public transit my commute is just dead time.
I listen to podcasts and don't actually commute in that often anyway. To the degree that public transportation = subways/busses, I don't find it all that different as it's not that conducive to reading anyway in my experience.
I concur. My daily trip starts with the not so reliable and overcrowded commuter rail, with its spotty connection, so reading it is, (with my earbuds on, no music, because this thing is so noisy). I don't deal with the subway/bus frequently but it is only good for podcast time, and often I prefer walking, because it takes about the same time as the bus, and has more benefits.
You don't have to go far from some of the mid-sized cities to get a relatively rural experience. I'm 7 miles (15 minutes) from Red Hat's building in Raleigh, and 1 mile from a corn field. My house is definitely suburban, not rural, and with the way growth in my town is going, that corn field will be gone in a few years, but there's plenty of rural land just a little further out.
I wouldn't place Raleigh in the same league as NY, LA, SF, WDC, Chicago and Boston. These have 5-fold or more the population density than Raleigh.
But the distance metric would stick: if you can leave ~7 miles (15 min) outside Raleigh and afford a good land, it compares with Boston area (5-fold pop. density), with 35 miles outside for a house on 1 acre land, and about 75 minutes commute during rush hour (would drop to 35 minutes outside rush hour).
But I don't think most people get 5x the benefit from living in Boston vs Raleigh. That said, I strongly suspect the greater Raleigh-Durham area is going to dwarf Boston in population in another 15-20 years. It's been growing like gangbusters, honestly since about 1980, and although property has become quite a bit more expensive, it's still nothing like the historically dense urban centers. For example, I'm in the process of selling my 4300sqft house in a beautiful neighborhood in Cary for $525k so I can move to San Jose (into a 1700sqft hovel I paid $1.35m for). If an expected salary for an experienced tech worker in the RDU area is in the $125-150k range (say, 10+ years exp), and is in the $175-220k range in the SFBA, that money goes MUCH further in a second tier metro like Raleigh-Durham.
So, people who build services for the internet finally found out it exists? And that if you work with github/slack/jira/several other services you already can work remotely?
It's ironic that so many people build services to "connect" people over long distances and find it amazing to find out you can work over long distances.
Do you seriously believe that glib statement? That if you don't move to the Bay area or a reasonable image of it you might as well become a fast food worker or whatever? Yes, there are certain advantages to industry job density but I actually find it rather bad advice to frame a career in tech as inherently depending upon living in a half-dozen or so cities--that can't begin to accommodate everyone.
Yes, I strongly believe that if a person is starting in tech and not established with a reputation, they should move to a tech hub. It seems like a lot of people are going to downvote my opinion, however, I am sure that each and every person who does downvote this opinion lived in or near a tech hub when they started.
I suppose it partly depends on how broadly you define "tech hub." If that includes 20-30 places worldwide, I'm not going to violently disagree. If it means Bay Area + Portland + Seattle + ...? Then I will. Especially because "tech" isn't limited to web/social/mobile.
If you want to work on a yacht, you have to move to Fort Lauderdale until you are established. There is no way around it. You can be a doctor anywhere, but if you are going to do medical research you have to be in New Orleans, New York Boston, DC / Maryland, or Chicago, maybe the Cleveland Clinic. If you are Marine Biologist you are living in Woods Hole, Monterey, or La Jolla. If you are doing aerospace engineering you are going to be living in Virginia, Southern California, or Washington.
It is stupid to think that someone who wants to do 'web/social/mobile' can get a decent start outside of a place without lots of other people doing it. I don't think that there is anyone on Hacker News who can say they succeeded getting their start in the industry outside of a 'software' tech hub.
If someone wants to be a serious software engineer they are going to have to commit to living in SF, DC, Boston, Austin, or Portland at some point in the beginning. It is disingenuous to tell people who are starting it is otherwise. Part of the commitment of being a software engineer is living in a place with lots of other software engineers for a little while.
It is not fair to anyone starting out to say they don't have to move to where there is a lot of activity. It is so unfair.
> Part of the commitment of being a software engineer is living in a place with lots of other software engineers for a little while.
Why? I am a professional software engineer with a job that involves working with the some of the latest trendy tools for building distributed systems (Kafka, Zookeeper, etc). But I've never lived in a tech hub.
> If you want to work on a yacht, you have to move to Fort Lauderdale until you are established.
No you don't. Marina Mile may have the highest density of yacht builders and dealers in the country, but it is far from the only place. Plus, yachts are a pretty small subset of boatbuilding, which goes on in all coastal areas.
> You can be a doctor anywhere, but if you are going to do medical research you have to be in New Orleans, New York Boston, DC / Maryland, or Chicago, maybe the Cleveland Clinic.
Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Memphis would like a word with you.
> If you are doing aerospace engineering you are going to be living in Virginia, Southern California, or Washington.
Dallas, Boston, St. Louis, Tuscon, Atlanta, Denver, and Melbourne would like a word with you.
> It is stupid to think that someone who wants to do 'web/social/mobile' can get a decent start outside of a place without lots of other people doing it.
First, it is stupid to think there do not exist a whole lot places with "lots" of people doing web/social/mobile.
Second, it is stupid to think web/social/mobile defines the tech industry. I have spent 14 years as an electrical, systems, and software engineer. I have never worked in that segment, and don't plan on it.
> I don't think that there is anyone on Hacker News who can say they succeeded getting their start in the industry outside of a 'software' tech hub.
"software" != "web/social/mobile"
Plus, despite the slightly hyperbolic way I sometimes bitch about my career path, I have spent my entire career in Dallas, and if I could learn to stomach either going back to the defense industry or jumping to enterprise development I could spend my entire career here.
> If someone wants to be a serious software engineer they are going to have to commit to living in SF, DC, Boston, Austin, or Portland at some point in the beginning. It is disingenuous to tell people who are starting it is otherwise. Part of the commitment of being a software engineer is living in a place with lots of other software engineers for a little while.
That is ridiculous, unless you define "serious software engineer" in a circular fashion such that one, by definition, needs to. Then your definition would be ridiculous.
> It is not fair to anyone starting out to say they don't have to move to where there is a lot of activity. It is so unfair.
No, it is not fair to anyone starting out to tell them that they must get their first job in one of the self-described software meccas and that they are a failure if they don't.
I think I may be a single person to provide counter-data. I live in a small mountain community. The closest thing resembling a tech hub near me is Irvine followed by Los Angeles. Easily 2+ hours away. I commuted out to near Irvine to start my career (about 1.5 hour commute, and still do the commute half the week). I know I am in the minority, and I would recommend that others increase their odds of getting a start by living near a tech hub for a couple of years, but it is not impossible.
> If someone wants to be a serious software engineer they are going to have to commit to living in SF, DC, Boston, Austin, or Portland at some point in the beginning.
Wow, what a shockingly inaccurate and unbelievably close-minded worldview. I got my start in a small city in Upstate NY, quite far from any major tech hubs, as a software engineer in the medical imaging world - happily spent several years there before I even considered moving to a larger city.
Guess I need to go back in time and tell my previous self that I wasn't a "serious software engineer", eh? Or is writing software that can potentially kill someone with radiation not serious enough for you?
> If someone wants to be a serious software engineer they are going to have to commit to living in SF, DC, Boston, Austin, or Portland at some point in the beginning.
Well, given that I've never lived outside of Dallas and my career is well established, your claim is patently false.
> someone who wants to do 'web/social/mobile'
That is an awfully narrow definition of software engineering. I've never worked with web, social, or mobile, and I have quite a bit of experience as a software engineer under my belt. I've done platform software work for a telecom, platform software work for a robotics company, and NLP programming for a defense contractor in the past, and I currently work on network monitoring software for another telecom.
That's a really obnoxious viewpoint. I guess if your idea of the tech industry is only google, facebook, etc then okay.
You've cut off more than half of the industry in favor of the big companies and vaporous startups though. You can easily make nearly as much with a way cheaper cost of living elsewhere fam.
I can give my personal take on working as a software developer in St. Louis. Ten years ago, it was pretty hard to find cutting-edge work. Developers here usually went to work writing code for Boeing or AT&T or Edward Jones, etc. (I worked for AT&T.)
But that's an outdated view of the world.
I now work for a medium-sized software company. I have multiple friends here who work at little web/mobile consultancies. There is even a smallish startup scene and an incubator [0].
Obviously, it's not on the scale of New York or Boston or SF, but it's large enough to render your comment absurd.
Personally I wouldn't be comfortable if I had to persuade them to let me work remotely to take a mortgage when the company has access to so much local talent. Maybe I'm reading that wrong, but if it wasn't an issue for them, there wouldn't be any persuasion: "Hey, can I work remote from now on?", "Sure!"
That's reasonable. Unless you've established yourself as an "A-lister" (whatever that means exactly) that gets to set the rules, you may not want to move somewhere there are no local opportunities. But there are gradations between back-of-beyond and unaffordable tech central.
I seem to be one of these "work for the valley from outside the valley" types, and I, too, would be nervous taking out a mortgage in an area where I might be relying on that one job. I resisted the temptation to move to some remote mountain hamlet, and instead sought some insurance by buying a home in my favorite non-SV tech area. (Although its been 13 years since I've done any work for a local company.)
Yet, I know people who do invest in the only-remote lifestyle, despite the stress when they are in between jobs. They must have nerves of steel.
In 1992, a friend got a job in the valley and I visited him when I was out there visiting the HQ for my company. He asked me to go with him to check out a condo he was thinking of buying. Remember that these are 1992 prices.
The two-bedroom place we looked at was just like one of my first apartments. When the agent said it was $250K, I almost fell on the floor. My wife and I had just bought our first house, which was about three times bigger as this condo with a large front and back yard in a nice middle class neighborhood, for $80K in St. Louis.
A few years ago, I saw him again. He has never owned a house but he now lives in a much nicer condo for $1.25 million. However, that condo just looks like a much nicer, updated version of that same apartment. He could have lived cheaper at an upscale, full service hotel in my town.
And the difference is you're stuck living in a "nice middle class neighborhood" with a ton of space you probably don't need. For many people moving to cities the value of the area is worth many times the value of the space.
I wouldn't trade my nyc studio for a McMansion back in bumfuck SC no matter how much you offered me; and I think there must be a large population that shares that sentiment.
That's really the tradeoff. Some people like trees and grass and a modicum of peace and quiet and privacy. Other people like to live in the caves of steel, with a seething mass of humanity flowing all around.
I think you can guess where I stand on the matter. You couldn't pay me enough money to relocate to Manhattan or San Francisco.
I suspect people like LordCarbonFiber (and myself) mean SF. Which technically isn't "SV", per se, but since the discussion is about cost of living, the same argument applies.
I, at least, agree with you when it comes to SV proper. At this point in my life, I wouldn't take any amount of money to live in rural South Carolina OR San Jose.
On the other hand, you can live in a beautiful small city like Greenville, SC in walking distance to most or all of your needs, a short drive from great Appalachian hiking, etc. for a very reasonable price. I don't think the choice is necessarily a boolean between big, expensive city life and bumfuck SC life. At least, I hope not, because I'm giving the Greenville, SC thing a try and liking it so far.
I think it's more about the culture you're surrounded with. From visiting that area several time I personally know that I don't want to be immersed in that culture. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with it that couldn't be avoided, I'd just rather live around different defaults.
I work for remotely for a company in NYC and live in BFSC (Gaffney). I'm also liking it so far. And, as a bonus, my coworkers were excited to find that I live a short drive from REST Fest US, so there's that. :)
I haven't spent lots of time in SV, but it pretty much felt like a newer, nicer northern NJ with great weather to when I've visited. Big sea of strip malls and suburbia.
Eh, I think that's more SoCal (LA/SD) than NorCal (SV). SoCal feels like a giant sprawling suburb with great weather, and NorCal is just cold, expensive, and full of hipsters.
Like, there's a very large chance I'll end up moving to SoCal if I'm ever forced to leave Texas (which might actually happen next year), but I have no desire to live in NorCal even if you paid me seven figures.
People's version of cold varies. It's pretty funny though. I was in South Carolina in Novemebr a few years ago and people were wearing down jackets and wool hats -- it was 55!
> I wouldn't trade my nyc studio for a McMansion back in bumfuck SC no matter how much you offered me
With an attitude like that, I certainly hope you never do: neither you nor your new South Carolinian neighbours would enjoy it.
I live in a condo now, but I miss living in a house and not being able to hear anyone but my family. I miss playing in the back yard as a kid, and roaming around the neighbourhood on long summer evenings. There are many nice things about cities, and there are many nice things about suburbs, and there are many nice things about rural areas too.
There's a good chance that in x number of years the accumulated toll of the now near subliminal low grade stress of the city will reach a tipping point.
At the start the excitement and glamour masks the near subliminal, slow, consistent erosion of inner coherence that nyc produces in humans. But in time accumulated erosion will become evident.
Your insides will be knotted up and tightly coiled, and you won't even know it, because humans can get used to almost anything.
Your fellow denizens are experiencing it as well, and many cover and compound the feeling with excessive alcohol consumption, and status seeking.
One day a tipping point will be reached. But you will think to yourself, "but if I leave nyc, where will I go? Where else is there?"
The city is a parasitical mind virus that takes over your decision making, in order to extract rents from you.
But there is still a faint penumbra of humanity inside of you. And it will want out. But you will be scared. FOMO, and a feeling that outside the city you will be socially isolated.
Well I am here to tell you that cool small towns and cities are out there. They have enough smart and interesting people to easily fill up your Dunbar number limit.
You can only really know and relate to 150 humans, we don't need 7 million surrounding us, and online dating apps have changed the social scene in small towns and cities. There are plenty of young women (or men) around you, even in smaller towns with an older median age.
Your range will have to increase, but for that we have cars. In nyc it can easily take an hour and a half to travel five miles via public transit.
tldr; it's not binary between nyc and bumfuck suburbs, and even many small 'boring' towns have a lot more culture, singles, restaurants and bars than you would think, or at least more than I thought.
My feelings on moving back to a small town halfway between NYC and Boston as a still fairly young single are probably best expressed by the Grateful Dead in their song Shakedown Street:
"Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart. You just gotta poke around."
I could give you the name of the town I grew up in but it's not going to mean anything to a non-native resident. If you've got a better turn of phrase for a low population town not particularly near anything, nor containing anything noteworthy I'd love to hear it.
You could have said "remote SC" or just "SC". I realize it's less colorful, but experience teaches that this is a price we must pay to have civil discussion online.
Had we been speaking in person it would likely have been obvious that you didn't mean it as a slur. But the bandwidth of online communication is so much lower that there's no capacity for such error correction even in one-to-one cases, let alone when hundreds of people are reading what you write.
Be careful what you wish for. In a world where physical proximity no longer matters, American programmers earning 6 figures, will have to compete against programmers from South America/Europe/Asia, all of whom earn significantly less than 6 figures.
There currently exists a massive salary gap between equally qualified programmers, living in different regions of the world. Eliminating the physical-proximity perks, will produce a massive regression to the mean.
I'd note that tech pundits and journalists have been saying for 20 years that many US jobs would move to India and other countries, but offshoring, while common, hasn't really made a dent in the US tech sector. It's interesting to think about why.
I set up an offshore team of four in India some years back. Two of the developers ended up being lackluster and let go, but two of them continued on as they were fairly decent. Even so the cultural difference was significant and it was difficult to manage them. I don't think it was their fault, they just had a very different views on what they considered was a completed task, how they went about asking for further requirements, etc. Whilst it was worth having them, there was a surprising and hidden overhead in cost for the cultural impact, as well as timezone issues.
Later in my career I worked with a team from Hong Kong as well, the cultural gap was less significant and they were able to work well with the management style given. We still had timezone issues (moreso since I'm from the UK which is further from HK than from India), but because they interpreted tickets in the same way and had similar views on what the definition of done was things were far more harmonious.
Communication is a huge factor in remote teams, and whilst there are lots of tools to aid it, communication styles across cultures can be very different which can cause a lot of friction.
I'm guessing that none of the workers you're referring to are IIT graduates. I agree that American developers face little competition from the middle/lower end of developers in India. But the top developers in India (eg, the IIT grads and Google-India devs), in terms of raw talent and job performance, would easily out-compete the average American developer, while still being happy with a lower salary. This is where the physical-proximity-perks that American developers currently enjoy, really make a big difference.
Yeah these definitely weren't top tier developers. Even so I was happy with the quality of the code on the two we retained, it was everything that goes around it that I struggled with. For example they wouldn't ask questions or admit that they're struggling with something. I saw a lot of this in the interviews as well, you would ask a question like "do you know what X is" and they would say yes, but then sit in silence. So you probe "well what is it?" and they would go "I'm not completely sure" or just try to make something up.
I definitely agree with you though. We interviewed one person that was exceptionally good: very experienced, good comms, ticked all the boxes. His salary expectation was around a junior dev salary in the UK, which unfortunately was too high for management who had set a budget per developer, rather than thinking it was worth hiring him and one other instead of four lukewarm devs.
My understanding though is that if you're restricting yourself to top developers in India you should expect to be paying 40-80k(and rising) assuming you directly hired them. And this doesn't include setting up all of the infrastructure to hire overseas, not to mention the increased risk of operating out of two legal jurisdictions, timezone differences, and culture gaps.
They wouldn't ask questions or admit that they're struggling with something. I saw a lot of this in the interviews as well, you would ask a question like "do you know what X is" and they would say yes, but then sit in silence. So you probe "well what is it?" and they would go "I'm not completely sure" or just try to make something up. They would sometimes sit for days doing nothing because they didn't understand the ticket.
Another was their definition of done. They would finish a ticket and mark it as resolved as soon as the functionality is partially working. I think because QA is enormously cheap in India they were used to handing things off to QA as soon as possible to save their own time. We didn't have a QA department so that was quite problematic. I started having to include all the edge cases I could think of in the ticket.
I don't think it's necessarily wrong, it was just different, different levels of politeness and views on managing their time. But it was these differences that made things more difficult for everyone involved than I expected. They probably had a lot of issues with my management style as well, although they were too polite to say anything :)
Salaries in the US and Europe cannot easily be compared by the numbers alone. There are factors such as minimum PTO, health insurance, paid sick leave, pension payments, etc. that skew the bare numbers. You'll have to find an US job that has similar benefits as the european job to even be on a somewhat level ground.
The Netherlands will pay a pension to anyone who lives there past the age of 16. You'll get more money for every year you live there. One year of living there will get you something like 18 euros a month when you retire, but it's definitely more than zero. It's giving back to someone who has lived there and (presumably) has contributed by paying taxes. Someone who as lived there all their life only gets something like 800 euro a month, so I think that it's expected that you will have other savings or an employer-provided pension in addition.
I've never lived in the Netherlands, but I hear that employers there will also contribute towards a pension for an employee. This pension will be managed by some sort of private company. I'm not sure if it's a defined contribution or defined benefits pension. The details on when you get your pension and how much you get probably depend on the company that is managing it. It may be that a couple years of working will get you a very small pension or it may be that there's a minimum qualifying period. In any case, you should be able to get some benefit from it, even if it's a one-time lump sum payment.
Yes. Especially if you have kids. Here in Austria health insurance for kids is free (until they graduate), you get paid maternity leave, Kindergarten and schools are free, college tuition is less than 1000€ per year, and on top of that the state supports you with about 200€ per month for every child.
I think offshoring hasn't hurt the American tech scene, for precisely the same reasons that "working in SV and living in Arkansas" is so rare. Physical proximity matters. Being able to talk and hang out with your co-workers, face-to-face, in real-time, matters. This is why top SW companies like Google, despite hiring developers around the world, still focus on having teams that are working together in the same physical office, as opposed to geographically disparate teams.
Eh, I've worked with teams in Arkansas and India and I'm not overly concerned. There are more barriers to collaboration than physical location. Culture and language are huge friction points when they don't align, not to mention responsiveness issues due to temporal displacement.
You can just "deal with it" and your budget, codebase, and timeline will suffer. It adds a lot of overhead. Hiring a worker a timezone or two away that speaks the same language and shares a national, if not regional, culture with the rest of your team is an entirely different proposition than hiring one on the other side of the planet that speaks a different language. It CAN work, I've seen it. But I've seen it be a deal breaker much more often.
Working from the West coast regularly with people in India, Europe,and US east coast, I disagree.
You certainly have some benefits of having teams spread out around the world, as you could virtually have someone working at any hour of the day.
But communication is very hard with the foreign countries, because of 2 things: time difference, and some language barriers. Even with only the 3h time difference, communication with the east coast is sometimes problematic.
It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US.
> It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US.
Or for that matter, if your QA is in India and your devs in the US need more information to investigate, that can take days...
I worked at a company like that. I'd come into the office in the morning to see a ticket from a QA person in India, they didn't provide the information I needed to reproduce/investigate the bug, so I left a comment asking for it. Of course, they didn't get back to me until the middle of the night (my time), so I couldn't act on it until the next morning. And then, of course, I'd fix it, and they couldn't verify until the next night...
The response lag can be ameliorated to an extent by having lots of work going on in parallel so nobody is blocked on one critical reply from someone in another timezone.
I've done remote development as an employee, remote development as a consultant as sole developer on a project, and local development as an employee working with other remote developers. IMO a lot of the issues people have come from inexperience with asynchronous communication.
I would argue that growing up writing open source with international teams, using IRC and email lists, not only has made me appreciate remote work better, but also gave me a mindset to understand asynchronous distributed systems better, too. But it's not an insurmountable advantage; I believe any team, if it cares enough, can work effectively with remote developers, and get the morale and cost benefits of doing so.
I escaped a year ago & live just outside of Richmond VA now. We relocated back to the east coast to be near family, and because of my wife's career. I have to travel to the bay area at least quarterly, but it has worked out to be 6 to 7 times per year.
Given no other constraints, I'd never pick Richmond, as air travel from here to SJC/SFO is not great. I'd much rather live an easy commute from a major airport with direct flights to SJC or SFO. As it is, I can drive 2 (or 4 with traffic) hours to IAD and fly direct with a decent schedule, or I can fly from RIC and change planes with a fairly lousy schedule.
The cost of living is so much lower between real estate costs and state taxes that the economics are much better. The day I changed my address from Mountain View to Richmond in WorkDay was like getting a raise. Even if I was a consultant and had to pay for my own travel, the economics would still work out to be quite a better.
Yup, similar story here. We moved for family + get out of the city. Cost of Living was something we knew was going to be lower but man, is it lower.
It takes some adjustment and I'm sure that remote work isn't for everyone but if you can find a team that it works for it really feels a bit like the future.
While I've successfully managed distributed teams (and there are a number of companies that do it heavily), working remotely is not a panacea. There is definitely something to be said for face-to-face communications. People miss out on a lot of hallway conversations when they aren't in the same place. There are a lot of other tribal dynamics that come into play when you separate people, even when they're at opposite ends of the same building.
Even a company like Google with global presence and an amazing proprietary internal video chat system generally discourages remote working and often defrags teams (reorganizes them so they are all in the same geography). And while it may be possible to get your current employer to let you move out of state, many employers are going to be reluctant to hire someone who is already remote and is an unknown quantity in terms of output. This potentially limits job mobility, one of the perks of living in a tech hub.
I had to chuckle a little that this mentions Grand Rapids. I grew up there and moved to Silicon Valley 18 years ago. I hated it there: brutal long winters (Google "lake effect"), hot humid summers, mosquitos, and a socially conservative monoculture. I definitely understand people's frustration with the real estate situation around here, but there's more to an area than just jobs and houses.
Some people enjoy the snow, green everywhere, no water restrictions, and less traffic. Sure mosquitos suck, but so does having everything be more expensive. There definitely is more to it than jobs and houses, so I chose to return home to the Midwest to get paid a little less(though not much in terms of cost of living) than I would at a Silicon Valley firm.
I also grew up in GR and moved to Seattle a little over 16 years ago. Reading the term "lake effect" cracked me up since it has been so long since I last heard it. Have you been back recently at all? Downtown has a bit more going on but wouldn't want to move back at all. Those winters are brutal.
I went back for the first time in ten years about a year ago and was surprised at how much downtown has changed. I also went back during ArtPrize which is very overwhelming. I have never seen so many people in downtown GR at one time in my life. Also, some of the new breweries there are great. But I still refuse to go back and visit during the cold months. Like you, there is no way I could survive a winter there.
Many companies will want to adjust your salary downward if you are moving from the Bay Area to a lower cost of living location. This article seems to gloss over that fact.
I live in Michigan and work for a company in SV. I love it in general but feel like it's pretty unlikely that I'd be able to find similar situation if I were to lose my job. It's not the best position to be in.
I live in Southern California, but not in San Diego or LA where the prevalence of some sort of other tech work might be somewhat possible. Instead I live in Imperial County (bottom right of California).
Here, all of the decent paying IT work is in the County, State, Federal jobs available in the area, but this doesn't really represent Programming/Development work very well since those are even fewer amongst these organizations.
There are no real private software companies and while I'd like to start something on my own and go full time down the road, there's still tons of gaps in how that would look, and potential financial risk.
So where I'm at right now locally is really the best place I could be in.
But...I worked at eBay in San Jose for a time and I had two coworkers, one who aws a UX guy who worked out of Austin and came into the office about once a month in San Jose, and the other was a developer who didn't want to leave Australia so they flew him in every now and again too.
I really wished at the time that they could offer something similar to me, allowing me to stay down here in Imperial County (mainly to be close to family) but still get to come up to the Bay Area and work in the office every now and again (a nice mix of both worlds).
On the one hand, I haven't gotten any job offers from any companies lately, but additionally I would have the same concern as jphillipsio...if for whatever reason the company that hired me and allowed me to work remotely decided to let me go...how easy would it be to get another remote job with another SV company? If that didn't pan out, what would be the likelihood of me getting anything remotely similar locally?
Lot of things people have to worry about in these situations. Stability isn't always important...but it definitely becomes a big factor once you have a family or other responsibilities you can't just easily stop providing for.
These are great points. I'd move back to small-town Florida in a heart beat. Lower cost of living, no state income tax, 1/10th of my commute time, sun year round, more land/house/space--there is a lot to love! Too much 'opportunity risk', though. If I got a job at the town's single tech company, or even that unicorn remote job, what happens when I lose it? I'll tell you what happens: I have to uproot my family and move again. Too much of a risk. So I bite my lip and continue to live in the Bay Area (and the rat race that comes with it).
I live in a small coastal village in Southeastern Connecticut and work remotely. What I did was purchase a three family house that provides a good bit of revenue on it's own. This makes me much less dependent on coding for money and smooths out the ups and downs of contracting.
I'm also looking into diversifying income streams with some seasonal side business in an effort to capture some of the tourist dollars that flow through the town.
My new goal is to buy up as much of the town as I can, I now see contracting as an income source to park in more rental property, and thanks to the magic of leverage and anticipated low interest rates, this should be a viable exit strategy in relatively little time.
The main reason I'd consider remote is that it's possible circumstances would force me to move out of Texas next year. If that happens, I'll be in a situation where I'd need to find both housing and a job in another city ASAP. I simply don't have the vacation time to waste travelling across the country to interview, and I have serious issues with flying anyway. It'd be much easier if I could get a job working remotely (without having to travel to interview) and then move to the town of my choice (which will almost certainly be a suburb of either LA or Chicago).
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadI think some of those other locations (SF in particular) probably have a bigger radius but a lot of the angst about housing prices turns out to apply to very specific urban locales. And new grads were complaining about the price of crappy Manhattan apartments at least since the 80s.
Not sure what extra hours you're talking about. I have a modest (25 min or so) commute when I go into the (suburban/exurban) office and frequently work remotely. I can't say I miss depending on public transit though I use it when I am in a city.
Have you tried a pair of closed-back headphones?
But the distance metric would stick: if you can leave ~7 miles (15 min) outside Raleigh and afford a good land, it compares with Boston area (5-fold pop. density), with 35 miles outside for a house on 1 acre land, and about 75 minutes commute during rush hour (would drop to 35 minutes outside rush hour).
Really?!
It is stupid to think that someone who wants to do 'web/social/mobile' can get a decent start outside of a place without lots of other people doing it. I don't think that there is anyone on Hacker News who can say they succeeded getting their start in the industry outside of a 'software' tech hub.
If someone wants to be a serious software engineer they are going to have to commit to living in SF, DC, Boston, Austin, or Portland at some point in the beginning. It is disingenuous to tell people who are starting it is otherwise. Part of the commitment of being a software engineer is living in a place with lots of other software engineers for a little while.
It is not fair to anyone starting out to say they don't have to move to where there is a lot of activity. It is so unfair.
Why? I am a professional software engineer with a job that involves working with the some of the latest trendy tools for building distributed systems (Kafka, Zookeeper, etc). But I've never lived in a tech hub.
No you don't. Marina Mile may have the highest density of yacht builders and dealers in the country, but it is far from the only place. Plus, yachts are a pretty small subset of boatbuilding, which goes on in all coastal areas.
> You can be a doctor anywhere, but if you are going to do medical research you have to be in New Orleans, New York Boston, DC / Maryland, or Chicago, maybe the Cleveland Clinic.
Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Memphis would like a word with you.
> If you are doing aerospace engineering you are going to be living in Virginia, Southern California, or Washington.
Dallas, Boston, St. Louis, Tuscon, Atlanta, Denver, and Melbourne would like a word with you.
> It is stupid to think that someone who wants to do 'web/social/mobile' can get a decent start outside of a place without lots of other people doing it.
First, it is stupid to think there do not exist a whole lot places with "lots" of people doing web/social/mobile.
Second, it is stupid to think web/social/mobile defines the tech industry. I have spent 14 years as an electrical, systems, and software engineer. I have never worked in that segment, and don't plan on it.
> I don't think that there is anyone on Hacker News who can say they succeeded getting their start in the industry outside of a 'software' tech hub.
"software" != "web/social/mobile"
Plus, despite the slightly hyperbolic way I sometimes bitch about my career path, I have spent my entire career in Dallas, and if I could learn to stomach either going back to the defense industry or jumping to enterprise development I could spend my entire career here.
> If someone wants to be a serious software engineer they are going to have to commit to living in SF, DC, Boston, Austin, or Portland at some point in the beginning. It is disingenuous to tell people who are starting it is otherwise. Part of the commitment of being a software engineer is living in a place with lots of other software engineers for a little while.
That is ridiculous, unless you define "serious software engineer" in a circular fashion such that one, by definition, needs to. Then your definition would be ridiculous.
> It is not fair to anyone starting out to say they don't have to move to where there is a lot of activity. It is so unfair.
No, it is not fair to anyone starting out to tell them that they must get their first job in one of the self-described software meccas and that they are a failure if they don't.
Wow, what a shockingly inaccurate and unbelievably close-minded worldview. I got my start in a small city in Upstate NY, quite far from any major tech hubs, as a software engineer in the medical imaging world - happily spent several years there before I even considered moving to a larger city.
Guess I need to go back in time and tell my previous self that I wasn't a "serious software engineer", eh? Or is writing software that can potentially kill someone with radiation not serious enough for you?
Well, given that I've never lived outside of Dallas and my career is well established, your claim is patently false.
> someone who wants to do 'web/social/mobile'
That is an awfully narrow definition of software engineering. I've never worked with web, social, or mobile, and I have quite a bit of experience as a software engineer under my belt. I've done platform software work for a telecom, platform software work for a robotics company, and NLP programming for a defense contractor in the past, and I currently work on network monitoring software for another telecom.
Haha! Counterexample: practically every programmer in my country.
None of our cities are "software tech hubs" like you'll find in the USA, UK or Germany.
You've cut off more than half of the industry in favor of the big companies and vaporous startups though. You can easily make nearly as much with a way cheaper cost of living elsewhere fam.
But that's an outdated view of the world.
I now work for a medium-sized software company. I have multiple friends here who work at little web/mobile consultancies. There is even a smallish startup scene and an incubator [0].
Obviously, it's not on the scale of New York or Boston or SF, but it's large enough to render your comment absurd.
[0] http://www.downtowntrex.org/
Yet, I know people who do invest in the only-remote lifestyle, despite the stress when they are in between jobs. They must have nerves of steel.
The two-bedroom place we looked at was just like one of my first apartments. When the agent said it was $250K, I almost fell on the floor. My wife and I had just bought our first house, which was about three times bigger as this condo with a large front and back yard in a nice middle class neighborhood, for $80K in St. Louis.
A few years ago, I saw him again. He has never owned a house but he now lives in a much nicer condo for $1.25 million. However, that condo just looks like a much nicer, updated version of that same apartment. He could have lived cheaper at an upscale, full service hotel in my town.
I wouldn't trade my nyc studio for a McMansion back in bumfuck SC no matter how much you offered me; and I think there must be a large population that shares that sentiment.
I think you can guess where I stand on the matter. You couldn't pay me enough money to relocate to Manhattan or San Francisco.
I thought you were talking about cars at first.
Funnily enough, that's what every suburban Walmart feels like.
I, at least, agree with you when it comes to SV proper. At this point in my life, I wouldn't take any amount of money to live in rural South Carolina OR San Jose.
Like, there's a very large chance I'll end up moving to SoCal if I'm ever forced to leave Texas (which might actually happen next year), but I have no desire to live in NorCal even if you paid me seven figures.
It does get cold outside of the Bay Area, but the Bay Area is one of those special areas of California for temperature (along with San Diego).
With an attitude like that, I certainly hope you never do: neither you nor your new South Carolinian neighbours would enjoy it.
I live in a condo now, but I miss living in a house and not being able to hear anyone but my family. I miss playing in the back yard as a kid, and roaming around the neighbourhood on long summer evenings. There are many nice things about cities, and there are many nice things about suburbs, and there are many nice things about rural areas too.
At the start the excitement and glamour masks the near subliminal, slow, consistent erosion of inner coherence that nyc produces in humans. But in time accumulated erosion will become evident.
Your insides will be knotted up and tightly coiled, and you won't even know it, because humans can get used to almost anything.
Your fellow denizens are experiencing it as well, and many cover and compound the feeling with excessive alcohol consumption, and status seeking.
One day a tipping point will be reached. But you will think to yourself, "but if I leave nyc, where will I go? Where else is there?"
The city is a parasitical mind virus that takes over your decision making, in order to extract rents from you.
But there is still a faint penumbra of humanity inside of you. And it will want out. But you will be scared. FOMO, and a feeling that outside the city you will be socially isolated.
Well I am here to tell you that cool small towns and cities are out there. They have enough smart and interesting people to easily fill up your Dunbar number limit.
You can only really know and relate to 150 humans, we don't need 7 million surrounding us, and online dating apps have changed the social scene in small towns and cities. There are plenty of young women (or men) around you, even in smaller towns with an older median age.
Your range will have to increase, but for that we have cars. In nyc it can easily take an hour and a half to travel five miles via public transit.
tldr; it's not binary between nyc and bumfuck suburbs, and even many small 'boring' towns have a lot more culture, singles, restaurants and bars than you would think, or at least more than I thought.
My feelings on moving back to a small town halfway between NYC and Boston as a still fairly young single are probably best expressed by the Grateful Dead in their song Shakedown Street:
"Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart. You just gotta poke around."
Please don't drop slurs into HN comments. Your comment would be fine without that bit.
Had we been speaking in person it would likely have been obvious that you didn't mean it as a slur. But the bandwidth of online communication is so much lower that there's no capacity for such error correction even in one-to-one cases, let alone when hundreds of people are reading what you write.
There currently exists a massive salary gap between equally qualified programmers, living in different regions of the world. Eliminating the physical-proximity perks, will produce a massive regression to the mean.
Later in my career I worked with a team from Hong Kong as well, the cultural gap was less significant and they were able to work well with the management style given. We still had timezone issues (moreso since I'm from the UK which is further from HK than from India), but because they interpreted tickets in the same way and had similar views on what the definition of done was things were far more harmonious.
Communication is a huge factor in remote teams, and whilst there are lots of tools to aid it, communication styles across cultures can be very different which can cause a lot of friction.
I definitely agree with you though. We interviewed one person that was exceptionally good: very experienced, good comms, ticked all the boxes. His salary expectation was around a junior dev salary in the UK, which unfortunately was too high for management who had set a budget per developer, rather than thinking it was worth hiring him and one other instead of four lukewarm devs.
Another was their definition of done. They would finish a ticket and mark it as resolved as soon as the functionality is partially working. I think because QA is enormously cheap in India they were used to handing things off to QA as soon as possible to save their own time. We didn't have a QA department so that was quite problematic. I started having to include all the edge cases I could think of in the ticket.
I don't think it's necessarily wrong, it was just different, different levels of politeness and views on managing their time. But it was these differences that made things more difficult for everyone involved than I expected. They probably had a lot of issues with my management style as well, although they were too polite to say anything :)
Could it be the proximity to similiar-culture Eastern Europe where inexpensive developers are easily available?
I've never lived in the Netherlands, but I hear that employers there will also contribute towards a pension for an employee. This pension will be managed by some sort of private company. I'm not sure if it's a defined contribution or defined benefits pension. The details on when you get your pension and how much you get probably depend on the company that is managing it. It may be that a couple years of working will get you a very small pension or it may be that there's a minimum qualifying period. In any case, you should be able to get some benefit from it, even if it's a one-time lump sum payment.
If you google around, you can find stories of long-time ex-pats getting blindsided by the taxes associated with those pensions.
In terms of "take home per month", expect between 2.5kE and 3.5kE for places like Ireland/Germany/Netherlands (YMMV) for a higher seniority
Now in Spain, Portugal, Italy it is going to be lower
Could it be the proximity to similiar-culture Eastern Europe where inexpensive developers are easily available?
South Americans (or even Mexico) will have a smaller time zone difference, less cultural differences.
Southern western Europe might be a good source of developers as well
You can just "deal with it" and your budget, codebase, and timeline will suffer. It adds a lot of overhead. Hiring a worker a timezone or two away that speaks the same language and shares a national, if not regional, culture with the rest of your team is an entirely different proposition than hiring one on the other side of the planet that speaks a different language. It CAN work, I've seen it. But I've seen it be a deal breaker much more often.
You certainly have some benefits of having teams spread out around the world, as you could virtually have someone working at any hour of the day.
But communication is very hard with the foreign countries, because of 2 things: time difference, and some language barriers. Even with only the 3h time difference, communication with the east coast is sometimes problematic.
It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US.
Or for that matter, if your QA is in India and your devs in the US need more information to investigate, that can take days...
I worked at a company like that. I'd come into the office in the morning to see a ticket from a QA person in India, they didn't provide the information I needed to reproduce/investigate the bug, so I left a comment asking for it. Of course, they didn't get back to me until the middle of the night (my time), so I couldn't act on it until the next morning. And then, of course, I'd fix it, and they couldn't verify until the next night...
I've done remote development as an employee, remote development as a consultant as sole developer on a project, and local development as an employee working with other remote developers. IMO a lot of the issues people have come from inexperience with asynchronous communication.
I would argue that growing up writing open source with international teams, using IRC and email lists, not only has made me appreciate remote work better, but also gave me a mindset to understand asynchronous distributed systems better, too. But it's not an insurmountable advantage; I believe any team, if it cares enough, can work effectively with remote developers, and get the morale and cost benefits of doing so.
Further development and economic growth will also create a leveling effect.
The future standard of living and costs in China and India looks a lot like the present in the United States.
As economies grow, and regulations increase (another way of saying externalities start getting priced in) the wage gap will diminish.
Given no other constraints, I'd never pick Richmond, as air travel from here to SJC/SFO is not great. I'd much rather live an easy commute from a major airport with direct flights to SJC or SFO. As it is, I can drive 2 (or 4 with traffic) hours to IAD and fly direct with a decent schedule, or I can fly from RIC and change planes with a fairly lousy schedule.
The cost of living is so much lower between real estate costs and state taxes that the economics are much better. The day I changed my address from Mountain View to Richmond in WorkDay was like getting a raise. Even if I was a consultant and had to pay for my own travel, the economics would still work out to be quite a better.
It takes some adjustment and I'm sure that remote work isn't for everyone but if you can find a team that it works for it really feels a bit like the future.
Even a company like Google with global presence and an amazing proprietary internal video chat system generally discourages remote working and often defrags teams (reorganizes them so they are all in the same geography). And while it may be possible to get your current employer to let you move out of state, many employers are going to be reluctant to hire someone who is already remote and is an unknown quantity in terms of output. This potentially limits job mobility, one of the perks of living in a tech hub.
I'm too soft now to survive a winter there. :)
I live in Southern California, but not in San Diego or LA where the prevalence of some sort of other tech work might be somewhat possible. Instead I live in Imperial County (bottom right of California).
Here, all of the decent paying IT work is in the County, State, Federal jobs available in the area, but this doesn't really represent Programming/Development work very well since those are even fewer amongst these organizations.
There are no real private software companies and while I'd like to start something on my own and go full time down the road, there's still tons of gaps in how that would look, and potential financial risk.
So where I'm at right now locally is really the best place I could be in.
But...I worked at eBay in San Jose for a time and I had two coworkers, one who aws a UX guy who worked out of Austin and came into the office about once a month in San Jose, and the other was a developer who didn't want to leave Australia so they flew him in every now and again too.
I really wished at the time that they could offer something similar to me, allowing me to stay down here in Imperial County (mainly to be close to family) but still get to come up to the Bay Area and work in the office every now and again (a nice mix of both worlds).
On the one hand, I haven't gotten any job offers from any companies lately, but additionally I would have the same concern as jphillipsio...if for whatever reason the company that hired me and allowed me to work remotely decided to let me go...how easy would it be to get another remote job with another SV company? If that didn't pan out, what would be the likelihood of me getting anything remotely similar locally?
Lot of things people have to worry about in these situations. Stability isn't always important...but it definitely becomes a big factor once you have a family or other responsibilities you can't just easily stop providing for.
I'm also looking into diversifying income streams with some seasonal side business in an effort to capture some of the tourist dollars that flow through the town.
My new goal is to buy up as much of the town as I can, I now see contracting as an income source to park in more rental property, and thanks to the magic of leverage and anticipated low interest rates, this should be a viable exit strategy in relatively little time.