This is news? It's just another ridiculous facet of living in the Bay Area. You're making 150k/yr at your software engineering gig, but you're 35 years old and still renting.
"Every employer" is an exaggeration, but I'd agree that far too many of them do. I also wonder if they do it not because it's "trendy", but because management has bought into "culture fit" arguments without challenge or at least serious reflection and criticism, or perhaps because of the envy that goes along with their own management responsibilities ("hey, if my ass needs to be in a seat downtown at 8am, so does yours, even if your job doesn't require on-site work and all-hands meetings").
Remote work is becoming a benefit, not a feature, and I think it's becoming a major factor in whether a certain sector of developers and engineers accept a given gig or not. Especially if you're a grownup and have a family and young children. And once you've tasted remote work, and have your own home office, setup, and workflow, it's hard to go back to commuting, time-wasting meetings that should have been an email, and million dollar housing.
For everybody telling that there is "real difference" of collaborating in person vs remotely, nobody seems to be able to explain what this difference _is_, except in some vague terms.
If the difference is "being able to go and ask your coworker directly if you don't know something about the project or want to share some ideas", it is: a) obviously possible over Skype, and b) it brings nothing but damage to development efforts, as interruptions break the flow for hours. Unless it is urgent, it is much more preferable to write an e-mail and go work on some other park of the project.
I am an introvert, and human interactions are draining my energy. Most of the developers I know are also introverts. Of course, occasionally direct interactions are absolutely necessary, but it is rarely enough to warrant 100% presence and constant interruptions, which simply don't allow to get anything done.
Those interruptions, on a small volume, are actually pretty important. That's one way that information cross-pollinates on the team. Those accidental conversations about the codebase can and do lead to reprioritising changes or coming up with new approaches. With a remote person, you don't get that. Remote workers can't make nearly as big of an impact when it comes to doing the stuff they /aren't/ directed to work on.
Also, at some point, somebody has to bring new hires up to speed, and I certainly wouldn't want that process to happen over Skype. Teaching new hires is an important time to get them on the same page on the team's practices and help find the rough spots in bootstrapping someone to the codebase.
In general, software development is much more high-bandwidth than people give it credit for. It's often much more beneficial to hash out an unclear specfication with a coworker over coffee than it is to forge ahead and just make stuff that seems like it could work.
I think the biggest benefit is sitting together with your teammates.
At JotForm, (most of) our teams have their own rooms with doors that can close. They can have lively "high bandwidth" discussion in front of a white board. People glance what is on their teammates' screens. Making comments about what they are doing and coming up with new ideas. They go to lunch together. Once a week, team lunch out is paid by the company. Informal talks turn into amazing ideas.
Sitting together as a team is very motivational. You see excitement in other person's eyes and that in turn excites you.
We also do a lot of co-piloting. Working on hard tasks or tasks that requires knowledge of two people can be done much more quickly when you sit together.
We do have many remote developers but they all work individually on individual projects. It works really well if you work by yourself and if you have a backlog of tasks to do. In such cases, working alone remotely is perfect.
Here you go (something I have posted previously on this forum)-
1. Timezone issues - this is, imo, the biggest one. Especially after working with people in China, India, Europe or even eastern USA (with me in SF bay area). People all over the world usually start working around 9-10, and stop working around 6-7. Meetings, code/design discussions are very difficult on those schedules, especially when you want a decision on smaller issues where a quick back n forth would settle the matter in 30 min if everyone was in the same room. And there are plenty of such issues, where unavailability of your coworkers seriously affects the productivity.
2. Impromptu discussions: These are triggered by spontaneous ideas, and ideas do not come according to a fixed schedule of meetings. By not having remote workers in these discussions, both sides lose (by not having more brains, as well as by missing out).
1. I live in Switzerland, but I work with US East timezone. I am an evening person, and it is very convenient — starting working at 3PM and have the entire first half of day to spend with my family (they all are morning people).
That's just not true, not by any stretch. Certainly not for the median salary, and not even for the average, even though that's distorted by the long tail of very high salaries. There are easily-googled studies out there which put mid-career median salaries at $150k at best. If that seems absurdly low to you, that's probably because your friends are a self-selected group (as they are for everyone). Sort of like "how could Nixon win, I don't know anyone who voted for him".
So does mine. I just spent a few minutes researching this on Payscale, which confirmed the impression I already had: someone with a degree from a good school and a lot of experience can easily get an offer around $150k from one of the better companies in the bay area (assuming one interviews well). Their median was $148k, in fact. Numbers like $300k or $500k are not typical for software engineers, even in the best companies.
And remember that not everyone works for one of the top companies. There are hundreds of thousands of programmers in California (not sure about the bay area, although that has to account for a lot of them), most of them are well out of their twenties, and most of them don't work for Google or Facebook or anything as prestigious or well-funded.
The median salaries listed on Glassdoor (although not filtered by age) for even senior software engineers in the Bay Area aren't even CLOSE. Your sample is obviously biased (not to mention self-selected).
I know people who make less than $150k who have bought homes and condos this year. It's not like every place costs a million dollars. Condos cost significantly less than that, as do homes in downtown San Jose, south San Jose, and east San Jose.
I wouldn't personally have bought a home this year, because why buy at the peak? But it is doable. The down payment is the primary hurdle.
Bzzzt. Inaccurate headline. A million dollars was the median price for homes that changed hands in a 90-day period earlier this year in San Jose. It is not the price of the median home in San Jose.
Have to disagree. If you've bought a home on the open market in San Jose in the last three months, the median price you paid is $1 million. That's what a "typical home in San Jose" "costs". Homes not on the open market don't have a cost; they have an appraised value. The market defines the cost.
Yup. The same is true of price tags in stores: that's not the price of the thing, it's just the most common price at which things of that class have recently changed hands, and is in no way indicative of what you'd pay if you bought one of them on the spot.
A price tag merely denotes the amount of money the current owner is willing to exchange his or her goods for. Recent exchanges may or may not be a factor.
Buying on the spot usually means paying the price tag (as a trip down to the next supermarket would probably confirm), which would mean that the price tag usually is indicative of what you'd pay.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're claiming that the houses that changed hands are not a representative sample of the total housing stock. I don't immediately see any reason why that would be so.
The Bay Area is just like the tech-heavy Nasdaq index it helps propel: When the going is good, the going is very good. But when it's bad it's really, really bad.
Detroit was really good for a long time too I hear. But don't worry this time it's different.
San Jose already has rising criminality and lousy infrastructure (at least when it comes to public transportation), regardless of the wealth of the software industry. I'm skeptical that it's such a "fantastic place to live" when that wealth doesn't seem to be paying for it to be better.
The software industry is clamoring to make the situation better... and are willing to pay for it. It seems like NIMBY homeowners (or at least, the city councils they elected) are actively thwarting progress.
Perhaps I came across wrong...I meant post-boom but not necessarily "bust". Bay Area is a beautiful and pleasant place to live in my opinion. Without the massive tech influence I think it will still be very attractive to people.
The only place I've ever been pickpocketed was in San Jose (in the lobby of the Fairmont of all places). I wouldn't pay $1 to live in the Bay Area, and I only visit when it's an absolute necessity. I realize that many people live there and enjoy it, but I see no redeeming qualities. Gang problems, high prices, overcrowding of everything, bad traffic problems, and on and on. It's also a myth that startups have to be based there to be successful, or that engineers have to live there to work on exciting things.
Sure: when the area is not paying top salaries anymore, or anyhow not offering a good life quality, those adaptable startup-ers will move somewhere else.
The Bay area has ceased to function independently of the tech startup culture. When all the "get an underpaid person who lives three counties over to do this everyday task for you" apps go under, half the population will be immobilized and starve.
But at least you'd be in good company; pg's already tweeted to the effect that cities which don't have Uber can't be startup hubs, so that would kill the startup culture of starting up startups to startup the startups by being startups for startups, or whatever the hell it is we allegedly do out here now.
Source on the "half" figure? A significant amount of talent is at large established tech companies with billions in the bank.
I'd love to see what % of workers in the Bay are actually at funded startups that would be adversely impacted if the economy took a bad turn because they lack a solid business model.
My guess is the giants would hire up a bunch of them and life would go on.
Remember that a mortgage is pretty much a bet that the "affordability" of your house will decrease over time (that is, either it's going up in value and/or your ability to pay for it decreases).
That's the trade-off. You're fixing its price today and making payments for the next decades based on this.
If you rent, yes, the price may vary, but there's no strings attached (at least, much fewer than with a mortgage)
Its more than that, because mortgage repayments are typically lower than rents (or at least equivalent), and include a percentage capital repayment. At the end of the mortgage period you have no monthly payments and you own a significant asset outright, which may appreciate in value. Usually the end of repayments would coincide with a career slowdown or even retirement, but with rent you're going to have to find that money for the rest of your life.
So a mortgage is:
* Cheaper monthly repayments now (typically), part of which is effectively long-term savings
* Eventual disappearance of monthly payments and rent-free living during retirement
* Eventual ownership of a significant asset, which may be cashed in or passed on via inheritance
Yes, that's a destructive definition of the word "mortgage" in that it facilities unaffordable housing.
Instead of defining it as a hedge, look at its actual intent: it's a loan, not a bet, that allows people to pay a large sum of money over time that they otherwise couldn't afford.
Access to housing isn't an investment, or a gamble, it's a basic human right.
Easy to buy a condo in Silicon Valley on an Engineer's salary. For as little as $350,000 you can have your own place. If you're a first time buyer you can come in with 10% down; an engineer can easily save up $35,000 not long after they graduate from college.
Once you buy the first property, you hold it for 5 years, sell it and move up to a bigger place, single family home.
No one is expecting a newly-graduated engineer to buy a $1 million dollar home. Who CARES what the big ones cost, these types of headlines are hyping a scene that doesn't exist, "a million dollars! I'll always be a renter!" NO, save up $$ for a year or two and buy that first condo. Then you're on your way as a 'move-up' buyer every 5 years or so -- selling the old place, buying a bigger place.
Unfortunately the price compression is incredible. You can buy a structurally sound piece of crap for a million dollars, and you can buy an unsound piece of crap for $995,000, in a bidding war with ten all-cash-offer parties.
It works when the market is stable or is going up but this is a highly leveraged investment on a basically illiquid asset.
Always understand that the price can go down ~30% within a year, forbidding you to sell and locking you for years with a stupidly high mortgage.
It happened in relatively "stable" places like Paris. There it was just linked to the real estate market speculation and not linked to a single industry bubble like here in the Bay Area.
What I don't understand is, why don't companies (or a bunch of them) that have large stocks of cash (billions/trillions) just buy a huge load of land somewhere in the US and build a country inside a country? There are places where land costs near nothing; just hook up all the facilities and GO.
You can even pick an existing city and start from there. There are tons of places in USA and Europe that would provide tons of benefits anyone willing to move there.
Because the bay area was created to be isolated, in a self-centered culture. by design (before the end of WWII, to create technology as far away as the conflict in Europe)
The "cool people" came later, those who were deployed on the Pacific Theatre and decided to stay there. Granted, some of them were there before, because of the cinema industry
Living in a van down by the river while soaking up that VC funded salary in savings for a year or two has never looked so attractive.
In all seriousness San Jose is a reasonable temperature for 300 days of the year I don't know why there isn't tent cities all over the area skirting the laws to undercut the market.
According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California#Climate), the average high in July and August, the hottest months, is 81.9 degrees, and the annual mean temperature is 60.5 degrees. I suppose you might think that was "hot as hell" if you were from Scandinavia, but by California standards it's a pretty moderate climate. It's certainly not as bad as many other parts of the state.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadRemote work is becoming a benefit, not a feature, and I think it's becoming a major factor in whether a certain sector of developers and engineers accept a given gig or not. Especially if you're a grownup and have a family and young children. And once you've tasted remote work, and have your own home office, setup, and workflow, it's hard to go back to commuting, time-wasting meetings that should have been an email, and million dollar housing.
If the difference is "being able to go and ask your coworker directly if you don't know something about the project or want to share some ideas", it is: a) obviously possible over Skype, and b) it brings nothing but damage to development efforts, as interruptions break the flow for hours. Unless it is urgent, it is much more preferable to write an e-mail and go work on some other park of the project.
I am an introvert, and human interactions are draining my energy. Most of the developers I know are also introverts. Of course, occasionally direct interactions are absolutely necessary, but it is rarely enough to warrant 100% presence and constant interruptions, which simply don't allow to get anything done.
Also, at some point, somebody has to bring new hires up to speed, and I certainly wouldn't want that process to happen over Skype. Teaching new hires is an important time to get them on the same page on the team's practices and help find the rough spots in bootstrapping someone to the codebase.
In general, software development is much more high-bandwidth than people give it credit for. It's often much more beneficial to hash out an unclear specfication with a coworker over coffee than it is to forge ahead and just make stuff that seems like it could work.
At JotForm, (most of) our teams have their own rooms with doors that can close. They can have lively "high bandwidth" discussion in front of a white board. People glance what is on their teammates' screens. Making comments about what they are doing and coming up with new ideas. They go to lunch together. Once a week, team lunch out is paid by the company. Informal talks turn into amazing ideas.
Sitting together as a team is very motivational. You see excitement in other person's eyes and that in turn excites you.
We also do a lot of co-piloting. Working on hard tasks or tasks that requires knowledge of two people can be done much more quickly when you sit together.
We do have many remote developers but they all work individually on individual projects. It works really well if you work by yourself and if you have a backlog of tasks to do. In such cases, working alone remotely is perfect.
1. Timezone issues - this is, imo, the biggest one. Especially after working with people in China, India, Europe or even eastern USA (with me in SF bay area). People all over the world usually start working around 9-10, and stop working around 6-7. Meetings, code/design discussions are very difficult on those schedules, especially when you want a decision on smaller issues where a quick back n forth would settle the matter in 30 min if everyone was in the same room. And there are plenty of such issues, where unavailability of your coworkers seriously affects the productivity.
2. Impromptu discussions: These are triggered by spontaneous ideas, and ideas do not come according to a fixed schedule of meetings. By not having remote workers in these discussions, both sides lose (by not having more brains, as well as by missing out).
2. There's Slack/HipChat for that.
And yes it's expensive, but at least they do pay well here
And remember that not everyone works for one of the top companies. There are hundreds of thousands of programmers in California (not sure about the bay area, although that has to account for a lot of them), most of them are well out of their twenties, and most of them don't work for Google or Facebook or anything as prestigious or well-funded.
What gives you the impression that people are making such a small amount of money in the Bay Area?
I wouldn't personally have bought a home this year, because why buy at the peak? But it is doable. The down payment is the primary hurdle.
haha no it doesn't! the median lost almost all its value because the median of (0.5, 0.5, 1e9) is 0.5
Buying on the spot usually means paying the price tag (as a trip down to the next supermarket would probably confirm), which would mean that the price tag usually is indicative of what you'd pay.
http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Jose-California/market...
Detroit was really good for a long time too I hear. But don't worry this time it's different.
Correct. For real business models
But on the bay area it's easy to get billions to built the next AirBnB for cats or something like that
Bay area is much more diversified and due to startup mentality also much more adaptable to failure.
But at least you'd be in good company; pg's already tweeted to the effect that cities which don't have Uber can't be startup hubs, so that would kill the startup culture of starting up startups to startup the startups by being startups for startups, or whatever the hell it is we allegedly do out here now.
I'd love to see what % of workers in the Bay are actually at funded startups that would be adversely impacted if the economy took a bad turn because they lack a solid business model.
My guess is the giants would hire up a bunch of them and life would go on.
You're right. Probably more like three-quarters.
That's the trade-off. You're fixing its price today and making payments for the next decades based on this.
If you rent, yes, the price may vary, but there's no strings attached (at least, much fewer than with a mortgage)
So a mortgage is:
* Cheaper monthly repayments now (typically), part of which is effectively long-term savings
* Eventual disappearance of monthly payments and rent-free living during retirement
* Eventual ownership of a significant asset, which may be cashed in or passed on via inheritance
Instead of defining it as a hedge, look at its actual intent: it's a loan, not a bet, that allows people to pay a large sum of money over time that they otherwise couldn't afford.
Access to housing isn't an investment, or a gamble, it's a basic human right.
Here's one: http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1060-S-3rd-...
Once you buy the first property, you hold it for 5 years, sell it and move up to a bigger place, single family home.
No one is expecting a newly-graduated engineer to buy a $1 million dollar home. Who CARES what the big ones cost, these types of headlines are hyping a scene that doesn't exist, "a million dollars! I'll always be a renter!" NO, save up $$ for a year or two and buy that first condo. Then you're on your way as a 'move-up' buyer every 5 years or so -- selling the old place, buying a bigger place.
Always understand that the price can go down ~30% within a year, forbidding you to sell and locking you for years with a stupidly high mortgage.
It happened in relatively "stable" places like Paris. There it was just linked to the real estate market speculation and not linked to a single industry bubble like here in the Bay Area.
The "cool people" came later, those who were deployed on the Pacific Theatre and decided to stay there. Granted, some of them were there before, because of the cinema industry
They, in a way, thrived on isolation.
In all seriousness San Jose is a reasonable temperature for 300 days of the year I don't know why there isn't tent cities all over the area skirting the laws to undercut the market.