In my personal experience remote work does not work so well. At least I haven't been able to make it work for me.
For the second point, well I think expensive cities are expensive because people want to be there. If you can choose to live anywhere, why not go to the best place, specially when you can afford it?
I've worked remote for almost three years for a profitable startup. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but not having a commute is incredibly liberating. I've also found my careeer options to not be limited by being remote.
Also, I live in Florida 20 minutes from one of the best beaches in the country. Not as "culturally fulfilling" as say the Mission or Castro districts (have been to SF more times than I can count, but have never lived there), but I sit on a quarter acre lot with a 2600 sq ft 4 bed/3 bath single family home with a backyard pool for ~$1000/month (owned, not rent).
Trade offs. Living in expensive cities doesn't necessarily translate to a higher quality of life.
I live in Brisbane, Australia. The global hub of literally nothing. What you've just described for living expenses makes me cry a bit thinking about the amount I pay in rent here for a small apartment.
Brisbane has direct flights to Singapore, Kuala Lumpar, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Taipei, Seoul, and Los Angeles.
I mean I'm not saying it's New York or Tokyo or anything, but it's hardly isolated.
Full disclaimer - I live in Provincial NZ so my perspective may be slightly skewed. Also, unrelated, what's it like to live there? Rents don't seem too bad (by NZ standards, our housing inflation is even worse than yours hooray!). My company want me to move there in a year or so.
Same boat as you, my friend. I actually just moved from Austin to the treasure coast for the exact same reasons (remote, beach, backyard pool on the cheap).
It might not be the cultural apex by tech hub standards, but being a big fish in a small pond is mighty rewarding. Not to mention, bringing that "tech hub" experience to an area like ours is attractive to all sorts of employers, regional and remote.
I'm basically in your same situation (although my area is getting more expensive as people realize it's a great city). I have worked fully remote or partially remote for years. I live on the marsh, have a boat, and get to enjoy the ocean all the time. I love visiting cities, but after traveling to many different cities I have never wanted to live full time in one (if forced to pick it would be London). I grew up more how I live now, so that probably has something to do with how I feel.
That sounds great! I'd move back to Florida in a heartbeat if I could. I used to live on the beach for chrissakes. But it sounds like a tremendous risk. You're betting that you're always going to get to stay with that company that allows remote work, or that you'll be able to find another one.
I've done a tech job search while living in Florida--not pretty. It goes like this: Company's hiring manager: "Move to the Bay Area or GTFO." I eventually had to do it so here I am.
So I live in Boston, and bought a condo in the slums as soon as I could. Not the worst slum (Green St., near Hatoff's gas station for those who know JP), but 50 yards from a halfway house, the suboxone at Arbour counseling and the needles near it, Mattapan is pretty close.
5 years later the condo is up 40%, Hatoff's gas is now being destroyed for (I assume?) more condos, a brewpub is opening pretty close, and families are moving in everywhere. And my mortgage is still $1500, and it will be for the next 25 years until it's paid off.
So why move? I can make great money and I locked into an improving neighborhood. Don't a lot of young people with useful skills do this? Buy into a hood-ish area and wait for it to develop?
I wouldn't have raised a family here before gentrification, but every month it seems more realistic...
My point is, I live an expensive city but I made the right decisions. And now it isn't so expensive, and when I'm at 10 years, 15, 25 years experience, I will still be here.
And anyone who thinks I'm bragging, you can do the same thing I did. My recommendation is Jackson Square and Roxbury Crossing, you can find quite affordable properties in Roxbury. Don't buy where things are nice now, buy where things will be nice later.
EDIT - Hatoff's is just undergoing renovations.[0] I wish it would close! Cheapest gas in the entire city, and connected to a gambling parlor. Not quite gentrified yet...
EDIT 2 - Yes down-vote all you want, sorry me and thousands of other people make economically rational decisions regarding where we put down stakes.
Hood can stay hood a lot longer than your personal life timeline. It's kind of like the assertion 'the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent'. Younger people who want to buy somewhere affordable get long commutes instead in boring bedroom communities.
>I wouldn't have raised a family here before gentrification, but every month it seems more realistic...
So for young people not wanting to chance the 'gentrification lottery' you're describing with regard to their personal timeline, what you're proposing isn't reasonable.
It is a lottery? Move where there is a subway stop and property is cheap. Allston, Somerville, Southie, even East Boston is coming around. It isn't fuckin rocket science
Lol you don't live in the hoods man...Jamaica Plain is one of the surburbs of Boston and one of the best around. I lived in WR and right now these are the most expensive neighborhoods of Boston...you live in paradise trust me!
It used to be a lot worse, and it could be a lot worse, but it has drastically improved. Drive down Washington. I used to live in Egleston Square, this is indeed paradise. I also don't know how well you know JP, one block is full of $3mil homes and 2 blocks down it's a disaster
I think you need to understand a neighborhood well before you buy in. If you throw a dart on a map, yeah it's a lottery. But anyone without a hole in their head could tell (for example) that Broadway on the red line was going to explode, and it did!
"Working anywhere" isn't as great as people make it sound. Being remote-only severely reduces your job pool, which is fine if you've got a good enough resume to get hired by anyone, but not so much if you're average and competing with everyone else.
Once you have the job, you find that it takes a terrifying amount of discipline to get as much work done at home, or in a coffee shop, as you could in an office. Some people can manage it; many can't.
That's not the case for me. I find being in an open-space office incredibly distracting. When I'm working at home, I can get completely absorbed in the job and work continuously all day long. Being remote is much more productive for me. It isn't for everyone though.
There's a similar issue with finance: someone anywhere in the world can execute stock market trades from a computer. But as a practical matter in the US 90% of trades are executed in a few blocks from each other.
As we learned from the aftermath of the last major meltdown, banks do a lot of deals that require more than just a Bloomberg terminal. If anything, deals like ( http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/goldman-bet-... ) require more physical presence, as nobody wants to leave a paper trail.
Can you elaborate on this? If you bought something from me then I think you paid too much and you think that you paid too little. That's, like, how buying things works. I wouldn't sell it to you if I thought you were paying too little and you wouldn't buy it from me if you thought you were paying too much.
Is it really that surprising? The cost-of-living vs. increased salary equation almost always works out in your favor if you are young, single, and don't mind a roommate.
It's essentially an arbitrage. You're being paid in the employment market where salaries are based on an average standard. Meanwhile you're happy living in the housing market at a below average standard and keeping the profits.
That profit quickly disappears though once you are no longer satisfied living like a college kid.
I wonder if sociology has anything to say on this topic. My sense is that young tech workers flocking to coastal cities are voluntarily extending their adolescent years, in the same manner as many graduate students. For many young people, 10 years working in Silicon Valley is really a form of graduate school, equivalent in earning potential to a Ph.D. at a world-class university.
The big question: after you get your tech "graduate education", are you able to put down roots and create an adult life in these places, or does it make sense to move elsewhere?
If the type of development work you're doing can be easily done remotely, then there is a good chance it can be done much cheaper by a fantastic developer in Ukraine, or India, or China, or some country where wages are a lot cheaper than US or England or Canada. If, however, the type of work you're doing benefits from face-to-face interactions (i.e. quick iterations with lots of feedback from users, marketing and product managers), you're likely to demand a premium, and those types of jobs tend to be clustered in large cities.
If you're a fantastic developer in Ukraine, India or China and have very limited needs (compared to a guy with a family and kids), your disposable monthly income net of taxes, rent and commute expenses is still likely to be higher in Silicon Valley than Ukraine, India or China.
A rational decision then would be to move to Silicon Valley arbitraging the costs as much as you can (living with roommates, commuting by Caltrain, BART or a plain walk, relying on company-provided lunches and dinners vs going out), until the music stops and the industry hits a headwind.
Then one can still return to comfortable living in Ukraine, India or China, but with a much nicer savings account than before.
I can confirm, I'm definitely thinking twice before visiting my friends and coworkers in the US again, and I'm positively not going to book a flight that goes through the US when flying to another American country (eg Canada).
take a random sample of 100 devs in Ukraine and India and offer them a green card to the US of A. how many do you think would take it? and for people who wouldn't, how many do you think would cite Trump as their reason?
Many would take it, no question. However, taking a green card doesn't necessarily mean that the person will stay in the US forever. The American culture and lifestyle is rather specific and not for everyone. It requires living in the US to start realizing it. You can't grasp it from abroad. Some developers return to Ukraine/India and feel happier there.
That's not a good question. There have always been people who wouldn't have wanted to move to the US, for various reasons. People usually like to stay at home, in a culture they're familiar with, near people they know, unless something really pushes them to leave.
A better question is: take a random sample of 100 devs in Ukraine and India in early 2016 and offer them a green card, and then do the same today. How do the numbers compare? Now you're seeing how many people would have liked to come here, and now have changed their minds because of recent political events.
I moved to SF from Slovenia. The percentage of my income that I save* is smaller, but the absolute number is still bigger. Turns out the glass ceiling for "smart dirty immigrant" jobs is much higher than the ceiling for "remote dude" jobs as well.
Add the nice bonus that there's simply more to do in a megalopolis of 6mio people than a city of 300k and it's kind of a no brainer. Unless of course you're okay stagnating in your career. Then staying home is financially more sound and you can lead a cushy life then retire at 35 or 40. But meh, life's too short to limit yourself out of cushiness.
*save and/or use as disposable income
PS: one thing I've noticed is that those of my friends who couldn't get visas are the loudest opponents of moving to the US and those of us who could are the loudest proponents. It's probably all bias and it doesn't really matter where you are if you're a good engineer. Work will find you.
I'm in the opposite boat as you. I am by no means a "fantastic" programmer, but I did indeed receive a job offer for working in NYC a couple of years ago (I now live in an Eastern European capital of about 2 million people). I concluded that living in a shared appt while I'm in my 30s it's not for me anymore, at least if I can avoid it, and there was almost no way for me to live on my own in NYC unless I had commuted from very far away.
I also couldn't fathom putting an entire ocean between myself and all the people and things I love. I see myself living in Berlin, let's say, but living half a world away was just too much for me. I was also well aware of the money I decided to leave on the table when I refused the offer.
I agree. Having a girlfriend from here and sharing an apartment with her (she also makes 6 figures) rather than strangers makes things a lot easier.
She's an EU/US dual citizen so she could move to Europe with me, but opportunities for soft skills people are hella scarce on that side of the pond. It's hard enough over here.
And 2 million capital vs 300k capital is big difference in "amount of things available" ;)
I'd prob wanna move to Paris or Berlin or NYC eventually. All cheaper than SF.
Hm thats weird, I was a junior engineer and living in Manhattan. And aside from simply being able to afford it with less than 30% of your monthly income, there are more than enough ways to get lucky on rent in NYC.
> Add the nice bonus that there's simply more to do in a megalopolis of 6mio people than a city of 300k and it's kind of a no brainer.
Can you give an example? I've lived in London before and I don't think I saw a single thing available there (that I was interested in) that wasn't available in much smaller cities. I mean, why do you need thousands of restaurants and nightclubs, when in a small city you still have dozens of them, and you don't need to suffer in the tube?
Variety? Also, theatres, cinemas, shops... Most of all, the fact that no matter what sport/hobby/game/activity you're into, you can always find people to do it with.
Restaurants and nightclubs aren't the only things people want. There is the arts and exposure to other cultures and languages, educational opportunities, recreation for kids (e.g. parks), and a number of other things that aren't actually available, generally, in these lower cost of living smaller places.
"Ok, which of the 3 decent restaurants am i going to today?" Gets really boring after a while. New ones to try open every few years instead of every few weeks.
You look at Yelp or similar and you've been to everything it suggests and decided it's meh. Or your friends have been and aay it's kinda meh.
There's also that argument that Oatmeal mentioned once. In a small city you have Asian restaurants. Maybe Chinese, Japanese, and Asian. In a big city you have Cantonese, Sushi, Japanese Grill, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Singaporean, South Thai, North Thai, Dim Sum etc etc
Maybe SF is a special case. The city itself is only 800k people, but it's surrounded by 6mio people which makes it feel a lot bigger than it is while retaining a lot of the smaller city feel. It's basically Bay Area's lower to mid Manhattan.
PS: London is massive. 13mio people in the metro area. That's twice the size of the entire Bay Area so yes, law of diminishing returns definitely kicks in at some point.
I don't get this whole hang-up about restaurants. To me, "the number/type of restaurants in the area" is something I don't even consider when deciding if I want to live somewhere. Admittedly I'm not a restaurant guy. I pretty much never go to them. To me, they're just an expensive way to eat food. And they are a pain in that you need to do so much just to "enjoy" the experience. Get dressed up, drive or walk to the place, wait in line, get seated and wait again, place your order and wait again, finally you get to eat, trying not to think about how much of your life you just wasted, then when you're finally done enduring all that, drop $100 that you could have used to buy groceries for a week.
Same goes for nightclubs, museums, movie theaters, "culture". This is really why people want to live somewhere???
> Same goes for nightclubs, museums, movie theaters, "culture". This is really why people want to live somewhere???
What do you do in the afternoons? Almost every home-hobby I can think of is improved by company of people with similar interests. Rather than do DYI in a garage, I'd rather go to a hackerspace. Rather than play the same N boardgames with the same X people, I'd rather to go a boardgames meetup.
And well, while you might not be into 'culture', there's a reason why nightclubs, museums, theaters, cinemas, etc exist. People like entertainment!
> Get dressed up, drive or walk to the place, wait in line, get seated and wait again, place your order and wait again, finally you get to eat, trying not to think about how much of your life you just wasted, then when you're finally done enduring all that, drop $100 that you could have used to buy groceries for a week.
Well, here's the opposite view. I don't cook at all; I'd much rather place a delivery order at one of 20 great restaurants around, depending on whether I feel like italian, thai, vietnameese, british, american, or any other cousine. Why would I spend hours buying ingredients and preparing food, when someone else can do the same for me, but better?
Going out to restaurants is a bit different - when you go as a group, the fact that you have free time as your food is being prepared is a benefit, not a cost. That's the main reason you go, after all - to spend time together, while at the same time enjoying a good meal.
For sure, I get that. I just find it pretty amusing that restaurants, of all things, constantly get brought up in these "Why do engineers move to the city" stories. Anyway, aren't we all working 60-80 hour weeks? Even if I liked restaurants and night clubs, I'd have no opportunity between work and sleep to partake, so it would make no difference whether there were good ones around!
> Anyway, aren't we all working 60-80 hour weeks? Even if I liked restaurants and night clubs, I'd have no opportunity between work and sleep to partake, so it would make no difference whether there were good ones around!
And you don't think that's a problem? But no, we don't all work 60-80 hour weeks. Work shouldn't be your life, and 40-45 hours is already a lot of time.
Thank you for answering that. It's still totally alien, but thanks.
Small cities, under 100,000 people even, can have hackerspaces. Maybe they aren't to your standards. (local one here has CNC, laser cutter, 3D printers for plastic, etc.)
To not cook is odd. Even when I lived alone in Boston, I cooked my meals. If you cook, you can be sure that nobody: picked their nose before handling your food, spat in your food (politics maybe), sneezed on your food, scratched their ass before handling your food, failed to wash the salad, plucked out a mouse and called it good, etc.
There are only a few restaurants where you can dine naked, you'd be seen by others if you went there, and you might have to suffer seeing people that make you want to rip your eyes out. At home there is no problem.
While waiting for your food at home (as it cooks), you can spend time together. It's the same as what you get, but with privacy. You can be as politically incorrect as you like, you can cry or shout, you can hold a burping/farting contest, whatever.
At home there is less trouble with kids. I'm guessing you might be single... if yes, how do you find any meaning in life? I remember being single, and I found it to be horrible. There was such a feeling of my existence being pointless. I very nearly jumped off a bridge. So life without family is unfathomable, and family makes restaurants awkward. It takes consistent discipline to keep a crowd of them under control, meaning that one can not relax.
Restaurants are nearly always too dim. I suspect it is so you can't spot defects in the food. At home I can put a 4000 lumen bulb in every socket, which is 6x or 7x normal.
You can go as a group to the supermarket. You can cook as a group. If you want peer bonding, this does it.
There's also just the joy of cooking. It's a skill, no different than programming. I feel the same pride in improving my cooking skills as I do my programming skills. It's nice to make things, and make them well.
> Admittedly I'm not a restaurant guy. I pretty much never go to them
Imagine that, a person who never goes to restaurants doesn't consider them when making decisions. Shocker.
I go maybe once a week. Sometimes twice. And I almost always end up going to the same few. But once in a while I like to try something new and it's great when that option is available.
And I don't know where you eat, but my fav kind of restaurants are in the $20 to $30 per person range. $100 is for special occasions.
Fun fact: in Ljubljana (my home city) you can barely even find $100/person restaurants. So even if you want to special occasion, you can't. And when you do, the food is often closer to a San Francisco $30/person restaurant.
Speaking for myself: I'm a massive nerd. I need friendships with other nerdy people to be sane. There aren't that many nerdy people in my middle American home town of 300k people. There are many, many nerdy people in San Francisco.
>If you're a fantastic developer in Ukraine, India or China and have very limited needs (compared to a guy with a family and kids), your disposable monthly income net of taxes, rent and commute expenses is still likely to be higher in Silicon Valley than Ukraine, India or China.
No it would not. Nothing can beat sub 500 USD apartment, 5% tax rate and 3 cents for subway ticket
Yes - it absolutely can. What matters in the above scenario is the total cash left over after expenses (surplus), not the size of the expenses (expenditure).
Sure, but it means that guy should make 2x of what he gets at home just to keep up, and we are talking about same person with same skills, connections etc.
So the real rational decision would be to start company with access to VSs in US and hire developers in Ukraine. Which is exactly what is happening.
But the idea is that you take a remote job based in (rich country), get paid like a (rich country) developer, but only have costs of a developer in (poor country).
And that idea is just that: an idea. It happens rarely enough that putting forward as normal requires some proof.
The company I work for uses remote workers from Ukraine and India. I know for a fact their salaries are less than 1/3 domestic salaries. This is in my experience what is actually normal. Pretty good for the cost of living, but they aren't saving as much as I am unless a good portion of their expenses are paid by someone else.
> If you're a fantastic developer in Ukraine, India or China and have very limited needs (compared to a guy with a family and kids), your disposable monthly income net of taxes, rent and commute expenses is still likely to be higher in Silicon Valley than Ukraine, India or China.
I feel like I'm rather average developer, and live in Poland (more expensive than the countries you listed), and still managed to save over $7000 per month in my last remote gig. No roommates either (I live in a flat I own). I feel that I'd be MUCH worse off in SV, or in the US in general.
Sure. I only work remotely for US companies, as they seem to offer the best rates/salaries.
My expertise is Scala, "Big Data", some machine learning and AI, plus generic Java/Spring/etc experience. My last job used only Scala+Play from that list. They were willing to hire remote people from across the world because (I assume) it would cost even more to hire experienced Scala devs in SF.
BTW if you care about saving money then London's contracting market is IMO even better than working remotely for US firms. It's worse now with the pound going to the toilet after brexit referendum, and will probably soon be only a memory for us foreigners though.
> I feel like I'm rather average developer, and live in Poland (more expensive than the countries you listed), and still managed to save over $7000 per month in my last remote gig. No roommates either (I live in a flat I own). I feel that I'd be MUCH worse off in SV, or in the US in general.
Sheesh - you're better off than a lot of US-based developers I know. Not everyone lives in SF or NY, and not every developer pulls in $100k+ (many do, but not all). I know plenty of jr-mid level devs not pulling in $100k. $7k/month is more than some of them make - certainly couldn't save that much.
> If the type of development work you're doing can be easily done remotely....
Let's not forget the kind that needs some hands-on interaction with specialized hardware (drones, self-driving cars, etc.) I used to work on calibration and test software for fiber optic switches. Working from home was difficult, considering I needed about $100k worth of hardware, some of which did not exist outside my lab, to do my job sometimes. OTOH, it also meant work couldn't easily follow me home, either, so it was a decent trade-off. I also lived 2 miles from work at the time, so I usually just rode my bike.
> If the type of development work you're doing can be easily done remotely
All interesting types of development work can easily be done remotely. Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, name it. The unicorn billions are all things that never needed face-to-face spitting.
It is therefore probably the other way around. If the type of development work you're doing requires face-to-face spitting, you are not doing anything interesting anyway, and then it does not matter anyway, where exactly you are working on your next failure.
> All interesting types of development work can easily be done remotely.
My employer would prefer I not walk out the building with the rather expensive test equipment necessary to debug our latest prototypes (which they would also prefer to keep in the building). Some of us software developers work on actual physical products, those which involve using a logic analyzer, oscilloscope, and JTAG pod for debugging. This equipment is too expensive to replicate for every engineer and has to be configured hands-on.
Different folks have different ideas of what is interesting to work on.
> Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, name it. The unicorn billions are all things that never needed face-to-face spitting.
All terribly boring to me. That's why I'm an embedded software engineer. Somebody has to write the code that keeps your airplane in the air.
"Easily" is the key word in that first sentence. Even the deepest infrastructure work, short of actually having to touch hardware, can be done remotely and the people doing it can be among the hardest to outsource/replace. It just requires a bit more skill, effort, and tooling, but employers - even those known for a generally high level of colocation - are willing to pay for an accommodate that.
Surprised this is so far down. I'm here in the Bay Area because that's where the jobs are. I also don't particularly enjoy remote work, but I do like to take advantage of the occasional WFH day.
There are successful unicorns that are distributed, remote companies today. That people haven't caught on it amuses me. It should be old news by now that remote companies are possible, that it works and doesn't impede success.
Ok but I don't want to live in a suburb or out in the middle of nowhere. I want to live in a major city. I chose this lifestyle for myself and so have many many others. Yes it's expensive but I make a lot of money. Money that I wouldn't make if I lived elsewhere. So like someone else mentioned above, the economics work out at my stage of my life. If I have kids, the economics might change and make me consider something different. But I don't plan on having kids for a long time so that's not something I have to consider at all.
I don't quite understand your point. You can be remote and chose to live in a major city that's not SF/NYC/London/Toronto, or be remote from SF/NYC/London/Toronto if that's your deal. The idea is to be remote so you make the choice at your leisure.
Also there's a ton of really cool cities out there that are nowhere as expensive as SF/NYC/London/Toronto and that are just as fun, if not more (minus NYC), and way cheaper. And working remote, they're pretty much all within your reach.
I'm not a developer, but after doing (remote) independent consulting for a year, here are my $0.02
-Human interactions: as mentioned, we are social animals and (mostly) enjoy being around others. You might not think this applies to you, but try staring at a computer and not speaking to anyone for a day. It can get old.
-Similarly, being in the expensive cities means you also get to be around smart people like yourself, who are also flocking there. Sure, you could live somewhere super cheap, but then who would you share your v intelligent thoughts with? There's value in being able to bounce ideas, compare notes, etc. with real people in real life.
-I've worked at companies who have employees in other geographies, but they pay these people less than they would in-house developers. If you're good at what you do and have the right connections, it can be lucrative to work remotely - but companies value face-time and might not be willing to pay as much if they know your living expenses are less.
-Motivation: It can be tough to be motivated to get work done if you're living outside the confines of an office. If you can master the remote lifestyle, it offers a ton of flexibility, but a lot of people need more structure in order to be productive.
Working remotely and getting paid the same as you would in an expensive city works for some people, to be sure - and they crush it in terms of $$. But it comes down to a lot more than money - it's a certain personality type that can excel with this type of work, and without the right disposition it's not really worth the extra change.
So poor cities are all filled with dumb people? At least we're not overflowing with massive pretension. I'll stay here and leave SF for the rest of you geniuses.
LOL it is the other way around, cities become most expensive because developers flock there and spend cash.
This happens now in Limassol, Cyprus: crowds of developers, most having their own startups, started to flock there since 3 years ago from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine - it was always a country to keep offshore companies/accounts, so every rich developer in ex-USSR already been there and knew the place, but since 2014 it started to make sense to move physically as well - in Russia people escape propaganda and mass chauvinist hysteria, in Belarus economic crisis prompted government to jail IT business people to milk them on their money (then frequently releasing with no right to leave the country - in order to make them earn more, then milk again), in Ukraine they are simply leaving the unrest and crumbling infrastructure.
Since about last year it became a virtuous cycle because developers started to move in simply because it's a place with many developers already so it's easy to exchange ideas, and then investment funds joined. We are witnessing a small Silicon Valley in the making (of course, with probable limits of about a few percent of the real Valley). It already made Limassol a much more expensive place, rents on cheap apartments almost doubled in 3 years.
Developers want to be where developers are, and VCs want to be where there are many developers, and then more developers come where VCs are... and you get another 'most expensive city'.
But startups has to be a tiny tiny fraction of software devs. Even in an area of new offices popping up I can't imagine startups being a large fraction of the companies.
Correct. 'real' startups (those you would read on techcrunch or hacker news about) are a small fraction. Most of them are 'internet moneymakers' in the wide sense, most don't need the investments, or operating in the grey area (like: arbitrage of porn traffic, various bots, etc), they basically just want interesting IT people to exchange ideas with. They still attract VCs wishing to prey on them whenever possible.
OH yeah it is so easy to take for granted how disinterested, uncomfortable and angry people will get at listening to your tech project, in most places.
Precisely. Short, one-hour flight, and pretty much the same time zone (barring differences related to when daylight savings takes effect) makes it easy to keep teams in Cyprus and Israel in sync.
Considering the massive shortage of developers in Israel, it really wouldn't surprise me to see deepening ties in the development community.
My town, Sydney is not expensive because there is a handful of Googlers like me live around here. Google here because Sydney is the kind of place that people pay lots of money to stay in. And so I have to pay too much rent.
I love Sydney, it is (spiritually) my home town. But I wish the company would move to Wagga Wagga. I mean the place even looks like Mountain View.
Ex-Aussie here. I wish that Australia would adopt a more de-centralise strategy on tech hubs. I live in Germany now and have seen multinational companies setup their European HQ is small cities or towns. This is equivalent to having Atlassian setting up their HQ in Bathurst.
I don't think it has much to do with strategy or tech hubs. The Australian population is just very centralised -- it makes sense given our geography and demographics.
In Europe "far" away from any big town can mean as little as 50km. Especially in Germany, you are never very far from some mid-size city which once dominated a independent principality.
Rhode & Schwarz, B/H/S and Siemens all have HQs within about 10 minute bike ride of where I used to live in Munich. Other companies in small towns were a somewhat more arduous bike ride away.
The companies I dealt with that were more than 100km from any big city were more into heavy industry. They are the Aussie equivalent of Newcastle or Gladstone, only with many more companies to go around.
You're absolutely right. Far away travel in Australia is measured in days, where as it is measured is hours in Germany. The extremely Australian population density does not help at all.
I agree with your comment, as there is a factor that increases the cost in the cities where developers live in.
Bringing up Limassol though, is not a valid argument. Limassol on its own has had a lot of rich people from Russia moving there permanently and in the past few years a lot of development went on there. The Marina or the pier etc makes it feel like you are in Miami of some sorts, so that definitely bumps the prices up and it has nothing to do with developers going there. Most rich people there didn't make money from tech but from illegal sources.
These people have been there since decades ago, early 1990s, and not much new ones arrived recently apart from developers. Large scale corruptioners you mentioned definitely don't increase prices on cheap rental apartments.
The development of the area in general is though. Limassol 5 years ago is no where near to what Limassol Now has become. And that has nothing to do with Tech/Dev's moving to the area.
Well, 5 years ago it was in the middle of crisis, but 10 years ago it was way richer and better place than it is now, i don't know what development do you mean. Then, Brits left, real estate prices collapsed, and it became much worse.
It's easy to see that Cyprus GDP is now lower (both nominal and real terms) than 10 years ago.
Now i am totally confused about how upvoting works here! 103 upvotes - i definitely never had nearly as much before. I don't really see what i wrote here was so valuable or interesting.
This site being mostly visited by Americans, we are interested to hear of this phenomenon playing out in other locales, especially one as small/niche as Cyprus.
Because there is no critical mass to "work from anywhere".
Amazon/Facebook/Google/Microsoft doesn't let its workers work from home in general. A lot of tech companies don't as well. So moving to CheapSmallTown means when losing the job still having to go back to ExpensiveTechHub to network and find a new job. So might as well stay in ExpensiveTechHub just to be sure.
Imagine if all those large tech companies and others allowed working from home as a default. I think that would be a sizeable economic and cultural shift. It might revitalize various part of the country, small cities and towns. It might reduce congestion, real estate prices in coastal cities.
I work from home and love it. But yeah I am still living next to a tech hub because chances are if I switch jobs I might not necessarily have a choice of working from home.
It's worth pointing out that the "big four" tech companies aren't the only tech companies worth working at. You could very well have a higher upside working at a small, remotely friendly company, from Chiang Mai or Bali where the cost of living is 1/15th of SF, and still have a relative mass of expats doing similar things.
Speaking from experience, I'm much more relaxed working from Bali, and I get paid only 20% less than I did in SF. Instead of spending 35% of my net pay on rent, I only spend 2.9% and have a higher quality of life in general.
When all your hard earned money goes to just maintaining social status or staying in a trendy neighbourhood, what have you got to show for it?
Out of curiosity, did you start your current job while in SF and then moved? Or did you find the job while you were already overseas? If the latter, was the hiring process remote too?
In my case (and a couple of friends) the remote salary was slightly less than your typical SF salary but I had no "fixed location". Right now I'm in London working for a different company but the job is also remote. The point of working remotely should never be "find very cheap talent" but rather "find talent globally and remove geographical bottlenecks". Or something like that.
When negotiating a salary, don't let your current location define your salary because in a couple of months you could be in London, SF, NYC or Tokyo.
Would you mind exchanging emails? I would love to ask you more specifics about your experience as I am thinking of doing the same. Email in my profile.
>It's worth pointing out that the "big four" tech companies aren't the only tech companies worth working at.
They're not, but there's lots of other large-to-midsize tech companies out there that people don't mention when they mention the Big Four, because they're mostly the same. They're in the same locations, and work largely the same.
>You could very well have a higher upside working at a small, remotely friendly company, from Chiang Mai or Bali where the cost of living is 1/15th of SF, and still have a relative mass of expats doing similar things.
The problem here is: what happens when you get laid off? Now you're screwed, because you weren't getting paid much (you say you only get 20% of SF salaries; that won't even leave you enough left over to move back to the States and make a down-payment on a house or a 2-month deposit and 1st month's rent), so you don't have any savings worth anything, and now you're unemployed and have zero hope of a new job in some foreign country.
This is why attempts to "insource", or locate tech companies in cheaper parts of the US, never work out well. You can't get many workers to pack up and take a huge risk moving to the middle of nowhere, where there's only one employer. If they get laid off in a month or two, they're really screwed. So people stay in the tech-hub cities where there's plenty of other jobs in case something goes wrong. It's all about minimizing risk.
This isn't cut-and-dry. There are plenty of opportunities to work in cheap parts of the country (US). If I lost my job (or more than likely, quit on my own terms, which I've done many times before, even before I had a position lined up), I wouldn't be concerned with finding another one within 2 weeks. Every day I'm responding to recruiters on LinkedIn looking for talent. And I'm not that talented.
There are even requests around the geographical region, which I consider if I hadn't had a family and mortgage.
I can utilize all the cutting-edge technologies developers on the coasts think they're privy to, too.
This flyover mentality gets me so worked up. It's really from a pre-internet era.
I can see your argument for doing so in another country (relocation, other added expenses vs. U-Haul across the country), but I'm making the assumption there's more than one fruit farmer there, too.
Yes, there are plenty of opportunities to work in cheap parts of the US. I get emails from recruiters for jobs in these places all the time. The problem is, these opportunities are not in the same place! So if I were to take one of them, I would then be working in a town where my employer is the only place that hires people with my skills, and if that job goes bad, now I'm forced to sell my house and move, because there's no other employer within commuting distance. This is why tech hubs are so popular, and why they're "tech hubs": they achieve the critical mass needed to turn them into such.
I'm sorry, but I simply do not feel comfortable taking on a giant risk by signing up for a house mortgage in a city where I will be forced to move out if something goes wrong with my job. I don't think I'm the only person who thinks that way.
"Amazon/Facebook/Google/Microsoft doesn't let its workers work from home in general."
I worked at Facebook as a software engineer in the Menlo park office and I used to work from home at least several times a month. I'm pretty sure google allows you to this as well. They don't allow you to do this permanently however.
I work remote, and I like living in SF. I've lived and travelled to many places, and SF is my favorite, despite how expensive it is. I live in a 40 bedroom "hacker house", where else am I gonna find somewhere like that? I can discuss the latest javascript framework in the kitchen. I learn about new cryptocoins in the common room. I like living in the Mission, where new restaurants are popping up all the time.
It's also really convenient when I'm working on something really complicated for a client and I can take a 10 minute bus ride downtown to discuss in person.
Could I save literally thousands of dollars a month living somewhere else? Totally, but it wouldn't be the same.
Probably an outlier, but i really enjoy my commute, because its 20 minutes by bike so I bascially get 40 minutes of workout per day for free as i cycle at a decent pace.
I also enjoy working with a team in person, many of which became my friends. If I loose my job here, there are plenty of interesting alternatives to choose from. The city also offers a lot of non-work related things that i would not want to miss at this point in my life (no, it's not clubs)
After having worked 5+ years from home I am really happy about my decision to have moved to a big city (Berlin) 2 years ago and giving up working at home, it literally changed my life.
I'm working at home now and really miss my old 20 minute bicycle commute. It's such a great way to start and finish the day, and separate work from life. Now I try to ride every morning, but it's too easy to just stay inside and start work. I'm considering moving to a co-working space full-time just to force myself to get on the bike. In my experience,
Commuting by car < Commuting by train < No commute < Commuting by bike
In theory i could work remote some days, but the cycling is actually a big driver for me to go to the office even on days where i am only there for half the time because of some appointment for example.
While the individual trip is only about 6km, this way i do 60+km per week which amounts to somewhere around 2500-2800km per year and i usually go pretty fast so that i am quite exhausted after 20 minutes. Last year i watched my eating habits and it was pretty easy to loose 10kg of weight and keep it at that level only due to cycling.
It also is a great time to think in the morning and even better to relief stress after work. The only upside to taking public transport would be being able to read, but in the usually crowded trains with 1 stop where i need to change trains, the uninterrupted reading time would be pretty small anyway.
> Chiang Mai is very nice, but doesn’t have the Met, or steampunk masquerade parties or 50 foodie restaurants within a 15-minute walk.
That's true, I do miss museums, theater, and live music from my favorite bands. But there's some really fun events (Songkran is coming soon), you can find some good music, and there's a lot of really good restaurants.
If I had a lot more money, I would probably live in NYC, LA, Hong Kong, or Melbourne. But Chiang Mai is great for now.
Melbourne like all Australian capital cities has congestion problems and very expensive housing. I've found myself wishing I was in the startup scene in Sydney instead (seems more mature and serious.)
I've lived in both, and I can assure you Sydney's startup/dev scene is far larger. For one thing, basically all the multinational IT giants (Google, Facebook, Amazon etc) have their Oz HQs in Sydney.
Fair enough, although Facebook don't have any devs here, so I'm not sure they belong on that list. I found a bunch of places are similar in that they only have sales staff here - RedHat has most of their devs in Brisbane and Cisco has more in Melbourne, for example. Looking at Amazon's jobs page it seems like there's dev roles in Sydney at least, and Google definitely have devs here.
Lots of sales offices in Melb (Google, LinkedIn...)
Losing Startcon to Sydney was one of my top reasons other than that international startups (particularly fintech) seem to gravitate towards Sydney.
Melbourne does have some noticeable startups - Carsales.com.au, realestate.com.au, envato, seek but I think there isn't enough done to phrase them. If you are in Melbourne however I'd recommend coming a Inspire9 pitch night or a SiliconBeach meetup. Finally Andrew Hyde's writing speaks of some of the strengths in Melbourne http://andrewhy.de/why-your-startup-should-visit-melbourne/
I heard there is a bit of a tech scene in Pai. There wasn't a few years ago when I was there but that is somewhere I could imagine working remotely from.
I lived in big city and while I enjoy most of my time in them, most of what I got to show for is health problems related to living in a big city.
I understand some people enjoy it, I for one traded a 50% pay cut for the ability to live far from any big town with a smile on my face.
I can cycle without breathing exhaust fumes, I can go kayaking from my backyard, I can go fishing after work, I can grow my own food, I can have a dog without feeling like holding it prisoner in a town, I can offer a healthy and low stress environment to my family, I can watch the stars from my backyard,...
Just giving a bit of perspective, coming from a guy who made big money. In the end money is worthless if I'm dead from one of the many things that will end up killing me by living in a big town.
I'll give you a reason, although it's a reason that's personal only to me, probably.
I love road cycling as a sport. IMHO cycling for pleasure sucks in cities, even ones with great cycling infrastructure.
The cycle paths are full of slow commuters calmly pootling their way to work|shops|date|whatever.
The roads in cities are full of distracted|incompetent|psychopathic drivers in motor vehicles all wanting to "punish" me for shaving my legs and wearing lycra.
The place for people like me is haring about in the lanes and hills of the sticks. :)
Whilst that could be true (there's a distinct mountain shortage in these parts) it doesn't entirely solve the city road/bike path problem.
In cities that are renowned bike friendliness e.g. Amsterdam or Copenhagen most of the cycling is low speed on the excellent cycle paths. Most of the riders are on utility bikes in their everyday clothing (as opposed to dressing to go fast and get sweaty).
If people are just peacefully commuting at 20kph (12mph) I would feel a bit of an arse if I went hooning past on a time trial bike at 50kph (31 mph).
Editor's note: Actually I'd be over the moon if I could maintain a 31 mph average for 10 miles! :)
The small town I live in actually has pretty good segregated bike paths but I only use them when I'm commuting slowly and not when I'm training.
In my experience, I've found the best cycling to be in the LA and SD area....bike aware culture and weather permits you to ride over 300+ days a year. I imagine California in general has great year round cycling
I work remote from central Los Angeles. The biking is incredible here. I mainly do hills and the Santa Monica/San Gabriel mountains provide some excellent climbing. There is very little traffic in the hilly parts of the city.
From central/Downtown LA, you can take Venice all the way to the beach with a dedicated bike lane. I rarely go on trails, as I only have a road bike. My favorite trip is to take the bus to somewhere north of Malibu and ride along the PCH for about 20 miles.
Off-topic, but LA really does have great public transportation. It covers nearly the entire metro area such that you can get pretty much anywhere and only have to trek a few blocks to catch a connecting metro line (whether that be bus, rail, or subway). The problem is you're not going anywhere fast.
I never do trails either since all I have also is a road bike. There is a stretch of Mulholland, where it is a dirt road, that is technically passable with road tires, but I have yet to attempt it.
I like Ventura Blvd in the Valley to make it to the beach. It is congested at points earlier on (east), but then it clears out. Venice is busy almost the entire stretch.
Then the best option is to live frugally on a high salary in an expensive COL location. Really only housing scales linearly. If you can save on that, your base salary can be doubl, which affects your 401k match %, your bonus %, any raises, etc. so even if your entire salary adjustment goes to rent in a couple years you would be saving way more.
Why do you think I'm not saving aggressively? I have saved at least a six figure quantity every year since my early 20s, which seems sufficiently aggressive to me. Being able to save is part of being able to afford living here.
You're right that I could take a higher paying job in the suburbs or in a rural area and save even more, but money isn't everything to me.
If you can live in NYC/SF and still save 6 figures a year, I think your current job would already qualify as "high paying", depending on your lifestyle and expenses.
"I make good money. Why should I have to live in a cramped city when I can live in a 3000 sq.ft house on 10 acres of land and send my kid to an elementary school that doesn't need metal detectors and armed security guards?"
Oh, I have no question as to why others don't live in the city. I was explaining why I do live in the city.
For completeness, the elementary school that I went to and that my kids will go to does not have or need metal detectors. I believe the security guard is armed. Are security guards outside the city completely unarmed? I have no point of reference for this.
Sure, but irrelevant. Who can afford private school for their kids? I bet executive jets offer great convenience and no security lines, but that doesn't have any bearing on my vacation plans.
Private school is popular in SF because there's nothing to stop your randomly assigned public school from being on the other side of the city, so anyone who fails the lottery goes private or moves out of the city. There are inexpensive private schools, like Catholic schools.
The article assumes developers could and would build great companies working remotely if only conservative managers, VCs and others irrationally standing in the way would allow it to happen.
That day will probably come. It might even be here, but I seriously doubt it. I think it still takes a lot of personal interaction and teamwork, and the tech for it is still clumsy, incomplete and annoying enough that it's just not good enough.
Are there any great companies built from the ground this way?
I don't know about Basecamp but Gitlab's salaries are about 60% of my current base for SF, and go down for less expensive locations that I have already considered living in. These locations cost about 66% of my current situation (I commute into the City from about a 30 minutes train ride). I'd have to move to a place that resembles a rube filled backwater by comparison for break-even.
I used to live in SF. It was exciting, but also shitty. I felt connected and alive, which was great, but also drained of resources, which really sucked. Oh, and there were 6 of us, in a 3 bedroom apartment. I had the living room. Yea.
I lasted 3 years, until I met my wife, and by then I was ready to move. We did.
Now, life in the suburbs, is slow. I feel somewhat disconnected and like I don't really belong to this community. My neighbor is a teacher, not a tech worker. I miss the buzz of the city, the energy. But, I'm saving money, and, working remotely is mostly positive (though I do yearn for office banter more and more).
Life I guess, is all about trade offs. Rarely have I found a situation that is entirely positive, or negative. Most, if you look closely enough, are a balance of good and bad. For me now in my life, the reassurance that I will be able to retire some day, is worth more to me than the excitement of the city. That may change... we shall see.
If it does change, I'll be lured back to the city for the exact reasons the article states. The city itself, is the draw. There's something about living in an urban environment, for some people, it's just a pace of life more resonant with their existence.
> Oh, and there were 6 of us, in a 3 bedroom apartment.
This is such a weird American phenomenon, the whole roommate thing. What on earth can make adults choose to share their home with a stranger? Why isn't there intense pressure for building many small apartments, rather than building larger apartments that are meant for roommates? Is it connected to the equally weird college dorm roommate system?
Why are people accepting a situation where they live together with someone they don't like? It's such an obvious recipe for misery!
Yes, the system (and the people who build and make up the system) decide to distribute wealth to 'non-productive' people. That's a good thing, exactly because charity of the 'productive' people is not reliable.
We are talking at cross purposes. The system directs wealth to rentiers, they are non-productive. The rich are the non-productive. The system does not allocate resources correctly, it's totally flawed.
Then I think you need to talk in specifics, not general statements. When you compare our systems with the 'default' of having no system (i.e. anarcho-capitalism), it seems rentiers (i.e. owners of capital/land) are directed even more resources. So if you blame the system, you kinda have to be specific in what aspects you're blaming and how they could be improved.
It's also not necessarily bad that some wealth is directed to rentiers, if otherwise the wealthy would have no incentive to use their wealth productively.
On the other hand, I think there are really good reasons for co-living beyond saving a bit of money. There's a great community aspect to it as well. On the occasions where I've lived by myself, I've mostly ended up bored and sedentary, whereas in co-living arrangements, there's always people to chat or cook with, hang out, etc.
Of course, I'm still in my late 20s, so take this with a massive grain of salt. But if my salary doubled tomorrow, I still wouldn't give up my flatshare. I don't see myself wanting to leave it for another several years.
Plus, you aren't really there except for sleeping and maybe a meal. You're always at work, with friends, out to dinner, at the bar or coffee shop, hiking or biking outside...
I also could afford to live on my own but I prefer to have roomates.
I live overseas,where as a foreigner a personal network is even more important that back home.
Having roomates makes my social life easier. No need to spend so much energy meeting new people outside. There are often people hanging out in the living room. I rarely feel lonely and often meet new cool people,at home.
> This is such a weird American phenomenon, the whole roommate thing
I think you're just sheltered; in every country in Europe that I lived in or had friends live in (Poland, UK, Portugal), students and young professionals flatshare. Or live with their parents, but it comes out to the same thing. If you're not already independently rich, you can't afford a single bedroom flat on your own.
The simple fact is that a two bedroom flat split two ways is always going to be cheaper than two single-bed flats. There's obvious efficiency in using the space effectively - no point in every single person having their own kitchen, bathroom, living room. Also, it makes sense that most flats built are 2-bedroom or bigger; that way they can be used both as flatshares for young people, and flats for families.
You don't have to live with someone you don't like - you get to pick your flatmates.
We don't. I'm an midwestern american college student and "roommate" means "someone that shares your living space" whether that be sharing a room to sleep or just sharing kitchen/bathroom/living room space. The only alternative I've heard is "suitemate" in suite-style dorms.
That's not true. Roommate almost always means two people sharing one apartment with their own bedrooms. Dorm-mate, on the other hand, specifically means two college students sharing a dorm room with two beds.
This is not true. Sometimes it refers to this. The vast, vast majority of the time, they are referring to someone who has their own room in the same apartment. Source: I had "roommates" in the way you refer to it in college, and after graduating, most people who I describe this to are actually shocked that this happened after freshman year.
Thanks for your comment, and that of others. It appears that my culture is the odd one out where flatsharing is viewed very negatively.
Sure, it's not non-existent, I have many friends who have done it at some point in their lives, but it was always with existing friends. Advertising for a roommate, i.e. inviting a stranger to share your place is very unusual.
People's expectations of privacy are simply much higher.
The cheapest form of housing for college students is one where you share a kitchen and a living room with a bunch of other people, but everyone has their own private bedroom and bathroom with a door that locks. College dorms is just not done.
It is possible to rent a room in someone else's apartment, but usually in that arrangement the apartment is built such that the part that's rented out is a bit more off, has it's own bathroom, and has its own front door.
2) American home-owners are politically organized, and constantly lobby to prevent the construction of both new single-family houses and apartment buildings in general.
> American home-owners are politically organized, and constantly lobby to prevent the construction of both new single-family houses and apartment buildings in general
That's over-generalizing. Many locations in the USA have sensible zoning. SF is the exception.
I live in Somerville, MA, and we had an article showing that only 22 buildings in our whole city are legal to build again under current zoning codes[1].
It's common in lots of places outside the US. You have a few choices:
1. Live with parents
Not something most people want to do past a certain age.
2. Live with friends
People seem to be moving abroad more these days leaving you with friends all over the world, but possibly none currently in the city you live in.
3. Live with significant other
Fine until the relationship ends and someone needs to move.
4. Live with strangers
You meet new people, if you don't like them it's easy to just move somewhere else and try again.
The '6 of us in a 3 bed' thing is insane and unrelated to the living with strangers point.
Where are you from that sharing a home with strangers is such a strange concept? Who have you lived with instead? If you were able to afford your own place you're either very lucky or live somewhere very inexpensive because even in smaller cities that's not an option for most people.
> Where are you from that sharing a home with strangers is such a strange concept?
Sweden.
When I went to university, I had a student apartment. It was cheap and tiny, 18m^2. There was a slightly cheaper student housing option where you would share a living room and a kitchen with other people, but in those everyone has their own private bedroom and bathroom with their own front door. Some of my friends rented regular, small apartments in the city. Some shared apartments, but always with existing friends, people they'd known for a while and knew they'd get along with.
As you exit university, you lose your student housing, but if you have a job you can usually afford a small apartment, a studio or a 1BR. The amount of people sharing an apartment with others at this age is even lower.
Eventually, most people get into a relationship, and move into a larger home as needed, and this is where the attitudes between the US and Sweden are the most similar, if you have a family and kids, most people get a house of their own.
One difference between the US and Sweden though is that there is strong political pressure for construction companies to build small apartments. In the US there's political pressure to build low-income housing and accessible housing, but for some reason no pressure for making sure everyone gets their own apartment?
Interesting thanks for the info. I'm in the UK and generally here if you go to University you will get a student accommodation for the first. Then you'll get your own apartment with friends for the remaining years and this would generally carry on until you're in a serious relationship and can share accommodation with your partner. Personally having also tried the living by myself thing for a year I much prefer sharing a house with a few other people (and I'm very introverted). Living by yourself quickly becomes very lonely and living with new people quite regularly is a great way to meet friends and learn about other cultures, particularly if you're living in a cosmopolitan city. Of course the main issue is still cost but for I know a lot of people that can afford a 1br apartment but would see that as a waste of money when sharing is much cheaper with few downsides (unless you get stuck with terrible room mates, but generally people are ok).
> Then you'll get your own apartment with friends for the remaining years
That's still leaps and bounds from the American custom of advertising for a roommate, interviewing a bunch of candidates, and then picking one. There's a reason the "crazy roommate" is a trope used in American TV and cinema.
That is completely alien to me. :-)
> Living by yourself quickly becomes very lonely
Funny, that's a complaint I don't think any of my friends and acquaintances have had. I'm just gonna chalk that up to culture as well.
Just to clarify the first point I meant that at university you will live with friends for the remaining years (friends whom you met during the first year). After Uni people disperse around the globe so you often end up somewhere with no friends and choose to do the sharing with strangers thing.
It's funny, that I kind of did things in the wrong order.
When I was in my 20s, I lived alone in a nice place, as a developer I could afford it.
Now in my 30s I live in a shared apartment in London, I can technically afford to live alone, but I'd rather save the money (it would be twice as expensive).
It's not as bad as I had feared, and the community aspect can be interested, it can also be very bad if you end up with the wrong people (noise, ...)
I think your misunderstanding just comes from the use of the word "room". To make things simpler to understand: room does not always mean bedroom. There are many rooms in a house: living room, bath room, bed room. Roommate simply means someone you share some of those rooms with (usually bathroom, living room, kitchen...) but obviously not the bedroom.
So, in the case of "6 of us in a 3 bedroom apartment", then yes, they shared rooms, but it's not always the case (I would've expected 3 people in a 3 bedroom apartment). Perhaps parent meant 3 couples (6 people)?
> What on earth can make adults choose to share their home with a stranger?
There's a really simple one: lack of funds to afford their own place.
Also, plenty of roommates are not strangers. I've lived with my brother and one of my best friends from high school, and really only lived with a true stranger during my first year of college, the first year I lived in Austin, and the first 9 months I lived in the Bay Area.
The most crowded co-living situations I ever saw were in Amsterdam, a place with a dramatic shortage of affordable rental housing. They were a mix of students and newly working people.
> Who perpetuates this system?
Low-cost rental housing generally isn't a good financial proposition.
Most expat workers in Arabian Gulf (GCC) countries live in shared accommodations to cut costs, sometimes 8 people sharing a single room. Life is tough.
California has adopted a system where new development requires approval from the people already there. If you like where you live you might block and attempt to change it. The evidence shows that in such a system people will block any and all proposed development, but being a great place to live with a vibrant economy and lots of job growth many new people arrive every year. More people need a place to live, no new housing == Crazy housing prices and everyone gets a roommate.
What's with the cultural notion that everyone needs their own kitchen and batchroom and "living room" common room? If you want cheap rent, you need to par down what you need personally, and share everything that you don't.
After leaving university, and moving on to a full time position in a suburb I feel completely disconnected. I didn't attend a ~huge~ school, but the sense of community was there. The lack of this feeling has been hard to explain, but this comment explains it very well.
I'm not sure if I will(or can) ever do something about this feeling either.
> I'm not sure if I will(or can) ever do something about this feeling either
Why? Suburban life might be the worst social ill the US has ever faced. If you're starting the mental spiral downward, pick up and move. Plenty of jobs in plenty of cities that aren't wildly expensive, but still are walkable (in certain areas) and have things going on and a normal community.
I know some folks thrive in the suburbs, but I really think it's the single worst long-term policy decision any country has made in terms of the damage it did to community and a sense of togetherness.
I travel a decent amount now, and I am absolutely amazed at how some supposedly "destitute" communities seem far happier than the faux-rich suburban communities in the US. In my opinion the social stratification and divisiveness we're seeing today (e.g. a lack of a sense of togetherness) is directly due to a generation completely cut off from each other in the pursuit of getting away from undesirables and giant houses.
I completely understand folks who would prefer to live in a rural community - but those who prefer to live in the suburbs I just cannot understand. It seems like the absolute worst of both worlds to me.
Suburbs are fundamentally alienating and isolating in my experience. The physical distance between houses limits the number of people you're likely to meet and interact with in your locale. The need to drive everywhere disconnects you from your surroundings and community, as opposed to walking and biking whose physical aspect creates a tangible connection with your surroundings. Disputes with neighbors over relatively minor issues get amplified by concerns over property values to the point of creating permanent rifts. Freedom of thought and nonconformity are generally viewed skeptically if not outright suspiciously. Strangers are distrusted by virtue of non-residents having no reason to be in the neighborhood, ever. Overall my experience is they foster a cloistered, narrow-minded, distrustful mentality that is intellectually stifling and culturally toxic.
There is a gated community in Florida actually named "The Cloisters". It has a guard house at the gate and it is surrounded by a concrete wall. You might expect this to be in a terrible city, but no! It's probably in one of the safest places in the whole state.
That's a bit over the top, but it is useful to able to quickly identify people with no good reason to be in the neighborhood. People can go their whole life without mugging or burglary.
As soon as I graduated I moved to NYC. I loved it, it was the most alive I've ever felt in my life. I lived there for 4 months and every day after work I walked around and marveled at a city so massive and stimulating that it didn't seem real. However, I was soon broke. Defeated, with credit cards maxed out, I got a plane ticket home with my last 300 bucks.
I lived in a midwestern suburb for about three years after that, close to home and bored out of my skull after living something like NYC.
When I built up some savings and experience I jumped again, this time for what I considered a happy medium between the two lifestyles, to Austin TX. So far so good here.
One day I will jump one last time to Silicon Valley, just to see what it's like. From there, having lived in all the places I really want to experience, I'll choose my final destination and settle down there.
Which leads me to learn that the 6 “Alpha Regions” of the world are SF, LA, NYC, Boston, Toronto, London, Paris.
Even if it’s not perceived to be at the center of the technological metamorphose, Paris is still being seen as a place where you can get stuff done.
It’s also one of the places in the world where you will get the most infrastructure, meaning technological infrastructure but also political, democratic, social, medical, legal, education and even cognitive infrastructure.
Most employers don't like remote employees. I go where the jobs are, and that happens to pay more because there's more companies fighting for developer talent. I'd go back to a smaller city in a heartbeat if I could find a job paying the same amount of money, or even just the same adjusting for CoL, but I doubt I'd find that. In larger cities I think pay goes up a lot faster than CoL does.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadFor the second point, well I think expensive cities are expensive because people want to be there. If you can choose to live anywhere, why not go to the best place, specially when you can afford it?
Also, I live in Florida 20 minutes from one of the best beaches in the country. Not as "culturally fulfilling" as say the Mission or Castro districts (have been to SF more times than I can count, but have never lived there), but I sit on a quarter acre lot with a 2600 sq ft 4 bed/3 bath single family home with a backyard pool for ~$1000/month (owned, not rent).
Trade offs. Living in expensive cities doesn't necessarily translate to a higher quality of life.
I mean I'm not saying it's New York or Tokyo or anything, but it's hardly isolated.
Full disclaimer - I live in Provincial NZ so my perspective may be slightly skewed. Also, unrelated, what's it like to live there? Rents don't seem too bad (by NZ standards, our housing inflation is even worse than yours hooray!). My company want me to move there in a year or so.
It might not be the cultural apex by tech hub standards, but being a big fish in a small pond is mighty rewarding. Not to mention, bringing that "tech hub" experience to an area like ours is attractive to all sorts of employers, regional and remote.
I've done a tech job search while living in Florida--not pretty. It goes like this: Company's hiring manager: "Move to the Bay Area or GTFO." I eventually had to do it so here I am.
https://remoteok.io/
https://weworkremotely.com/
https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote
https://www.wfh.io/
https://jobmote.com/
I mean that it is only natural that like minded people seeks one another, and group up in clusters.
It is human nature.
Yes, it's expensive, but there are also opportunity, and humans are opportunistic creatures.
5 years later the condo is up 40%, Hatoff's gas is now being destroyed for (I assume?) more condos, a brewpub is opening pretty close, and families are moving in everywhere. And my mortgage is still $1500, and it will be for the next 25 years until it's paid off.
So why move? I can make great money and I locked into an improving neighborhood. Don't a lot of young people with useful skills do this? Buy into a hood-ish area and wait for it to develop?
I wouldn't have raised a family here before gentrification, but every month it seems more realistic...
My point is, I live an expensive city but I made the right decisions. And now it isn't so expensive, and when I'm at 10 years, 15, 25 years experience, I will still be here.
And anyone who thinks I'm bragging, you can do the same thing I did. My recommendation is Jackson Square and Roxbury Crossing, you can find quite affordable properties in Roxbury. Don't buy where things are nice now, buy where things will be nice later.
EDIT - Hatoff's is just undergoing renovations.[0] I wish it would close! Cheapest gas in the entire city, and connected to a gambling parlor. Not quite gentrified yet...
EDIT 2 - Yes down-vote all you want, sorry me and thousands of other people make economically rational decisions regarding where we put down stakes.
[0] http://www.jamaicaplainnews.com/2017/04/02/historic-hatoffs-...
>I wouldn't have raised a family here before gentrification, but every month it seems more realistic...
So for young people not wanting to chance the 'gentrification lottery' you're describing with regard to their personal timeline, what you're proposing isn't reasonable.
Murder rate per 100k: Boston - 6 Chicago - 20 Atlanta - 20 Washington, DC - 24 Detroit - 44
Boston is a very safe US city.
http://www.areavibes.com/compare-results/?place1=Boston%2C%2...
I think you are bragging and that you don't understand the wider system, nor where your gains come from.
Once you have the job, you find that it takes a terrifying amount of discipline to get as much work done at home, or in a coffee shop, as you could in an office. Some people can manage it; many can't.
Exactly. And while the retail investors play, the real money is made on that 1%.
It's essentially an arbitrage. You're being paid in the employment market where salaries are based on an average standard. Meanwhile you're happy living in the housing market at a below average standard and keeping the profits.
That profit quickly disappears though once you are no longer satisfied living like a college kid.
The big question: after you get your tech "graduate education", are you able to put down roots and create an adult life in these places, or does it make sense to move elsewhere?
A rational decision then would be to move to Silicon Valley arbitraging the costs as much as you can (living with roommates, commuting by Caltrain, BART or a plain walk, relying on company-provided lunches and dinners vs going out), until the music stops and the industry hits a headwind.
Then one can still return to comfortable living in Ukraine, India or China, but with a much nicer savings account than before.
A better question is: take a random sample of 100 devs in Ukraine and India in early 2016 and offer them a green card, and then do the same today. How do the numbers compare? Now you're seeing how many people would have liked to come here, and now have changed their minds because of recent political events.
I moved to SF from Slovenia. The percentage of my income that I save* is smaller, but the absolute number is still bigger. Turns out the glass ceiling for "smart dirty immigrant" jobs is much higher than the ceiling for "remote dude" jobs as well.
Add the nice bonus that there's simply more to do in a megalopolis of 6mio people than a city of 300k and it's kind of a no brainer. Unless of course you're okay stagnating in your career. Then staying home is financially more sound and you can lead a cushy life then retire at 35 or 40. But meh, life's too short to limit yourself out of cushiness.
*save and/or use as disposable income
PS: one thing I've noticed is that those of my friends who couldn't get visas are the loudest opponents of moving to the US and those of us who could are the loudest proponents. It's probably all bias and it doesn't really matter where you are if you're a good engineer. Work will find you.
I also couldn't fathom putting an entire ocean between myself and all the people and things I love. I see myself living in Berlin, let's say, but living half a world away was just too much for me. I was also well aware of the money I decided to leave on the table when I refused the offer.
She's an EU/US dual citizen so she could move to Europe with me, but opportunities for soft skills people are hella scarce on that side of the pond. It's hard enough over here.
And 2 million capital vs 300k capital is big difference in "amount of things available" ;)
I'd prob wanna move to Paris or Berlin or NYC eventually. All cheaper than SF.
Can you give an example? I've lived in London before and I don't think I saw a single thing available there (that I was interested in) that wasn't available in much smaller cities. I mean, why do you need thousands of restaurants and nightclubs, when in a small city you still have dozens of them, and you don't need to suffer in the tube?
You look at Yelp or similar and you've been to everything it suggests and decided it's meh. Or your friends have been and aay it's kinda meh.
There's also that argument that Oatmeal mentioned once. In a small city you have Asian restaurants. Maybe Chinese, Japanese, and Asian. In a big city you have Cantonese, Sushi, Japanese Grill, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Singaporean, South Thai, North Thai, Dim Sum etc etc
Maybe SF is a special case. The city itself is only 800k people, but it's surrounded by 6mio people which makes it feel a lot bigger than it is while retaining a lot of the smaller city feel. It's basically Bay Area's lower to mid Manhattan.
PS: London is massive. 13mio people in the metro area. That's twice the size of the entire Bay Area so yes, law of diminishing returns definitely kicks in at some point.
Same goes for nightclubs, museums, movie theaters, "culture". This is really why people want to live somewhere???
> Same goes for nightclubs, museums, movie theaters, "culture". This is really why people want to live somewhere???
What do you do in the afternoons? Almost every home-hobby I can think of is improved by company of people with similar interests. Rather than do DYI in a garage, I'd rather go to a hackerspace. Rather than play the same N boardgames with the same X people, I'd rather to go a boardgames meetup.
And well, while you might not be into 'culture', there's a reason why nightclubs, museums, theaters, cinemas, etc exist. People like entertainment!
> Get dressed up, drive or walk to the place, wait in line, get seated and wait again, place your order and wait again, finally you get to eat, trying not to think about how much of your life you just wasted, then when you're finally done enduring all that, drop $100 that you could have used to buy groceries for a week.
Well, here's the opposite view. I don't cook at all; I'd much rather place a delivery order at one of 20 great restaurants around, depending on whether I feel like italian, thai, vietnameese, british, american, or any other cousine. Why would I spend hours buying ingredients and preparing food, when someone else can do the same for me, but better?
Going out to restaurants is a bit different - when you go as a group, the fact that you have free time as your food is being prepared is a benefit, not a cost. That's the main reason you go, after all - to spend time together, while at the same time enjoying a good meal.
For sure, I get that. I just find it pretty amusing that restaurants, of all things, constantly get brought up in these "Why do engineers move to the city" stories. Anyway, aren't we all working 60-80 hour weeks? Even if I liked restaurants and night clubs, I'd have no opportunity between work and sleep to partake, so it would make no difference whether there were good ones around!
Without a commute that's plenty of time for restaurants and bars ;)
And you don't think that's a problem? But no, we don't all work 60-80 hour weeks. Work shouldn't be your life, and 40-45 hours is already a lot of time.
Small cities, under 100,000 people even, can have hackerspaces. Maybe they aren't to your standards. (local one here has CNC, laser cutter, 3D printers for plastic, etc.)
To not cook is odd. Even when I lived alone in Boston, I cooked my meals. If you cook, you can be sure that nobody: picked their nose before handling your food, spat in your food (politics maybe), sneezed on your food, scratched their ass before handling your food, failed to wash the salad, plucked out a mouse and called it good, etc.
There are only a few restaurants where you can dine naked, you'd be seen by others if you went there, and you might have to suffer seeing people that make you want to rip your eyes out. At home there is no problem.
While waiting for your food at home (as it cooks), you can spend time together. It's the same as what you get, but with privacy. You can be as politically incorrect as you like, you can cry or shout, you can hold a burping/farting contest, whatever.
At home there is less trouble with kids. I'm guessing you might be single... if yes, how do you find any meaning in life? I remember being single, and I found it to be horrible. There was such a feeling of my existence being pointless. I very nearly jumped off a bridge. So life without family is unfathomable, and family makes restaurants awkward. It takes consistent discipline to keep a crowd of them under control, meaning that one can not relax.
Restaurants are nearly always too dim. I suspect it is so you can't spot defects in the food. At home I can put a 4000 lumen bulb in every socket, which is 6x or 7x normal.
You can go as a group to the supermarket. You can cook as a group. If you want peer bonding, this does it.
Imagine that, a person who never goes to restaurants doesn't consider them when making decisions. Shocker.
I go maybe once a week. Sometimes twice. And I almost always end up going to the same few. But once in a while I like to try something new and it's great when that option is available.
And I don't know where you eat, but my fav kind of restaurants are in the $20 to $30 per person range. $100 is for special occasions.
Fun fact: in Ljubljana (my home city) you can barely even find $100/person restaurants. So even if you want to special occasion, you can't. And when you do, the food is often closer to a San Francisco $30/person restaurant.
So yeah
No it would not. Nothing can beat sub 500 USD apartment, 5% tax rate and 3 cents for subway ticket
So the real rational decision would be to start company with access to VSs in US and hire developers in Ukraine. Which is exactly what is happening.
The company I work for uses remote workers from Ukraine and India. I know for a fact their salaries are less than 1/3 domestic salaries. This is in my experience what is actually normal. Pretty good for the cost of living, but they aren't saving as much as I am unless a good portion of their expenses are paid by someone else.
What are absolute numbers?
https://dou.ua/lenta/articles/salary-report-dec-2016/?from=s...
I feel like I'm rather average developer, and live in Poland (more expensive than the countries you listed), and still managed to save over $7000 per month in my last remote gig. No roommates either (I live in a flat I own). I feel that I'd be MUCH worse off in SV, or in the US in general.
Were you contracting for US companies in your previous remote job?
My expertise is Scala, "Big Data", some machine learning and AI, plus generic Java/Spring/etc experience. My last job used only Scala+Play from that list. They were willing to hire remote people from across the world because (I assume) it would cost even more to hire experienced Scala devs in SF.
BTW if you care about saving money then London's contracting market is IMO even better than working remotely for US firms. It's worse now with the pound going to the toilet after brexit referendum, and will probably soon be only a memory for us foreigners though.
Sheesh - you're better off than a lot of US-based developers I know. Not everyone lives in SF or NY, and not every developer pulls in $100k+ (many do, but not all). I know plenty of jr-mid level devs not pulling in $100k. $7k/month is more than some of them make - certainly couldn't save that much.
I'm saving that much on an ongoing basis at my full-time job in SF.
I do have a roommate, but, to be honest, the weather alone makes it worth it.
Let's not forget the kind that needs some hands-on interaction with specialized hardware (drones, self-driving cars, etc.) I used to work on calibration and test software for fiber optic switches. Working from home was difficult, considering I needed about $100k worth of hardware, some of which did not exist outside my lab, to do my job sometimes. OTOH, it also meant work couldn't easily follow me home, either, so it was a decent trade-off. I also lived 2 miles from work at the time, so I usually just rode my bike.
All interesting types of development work can easily be done remotely. Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, name it. The unicorn billions are all things that never needed face-to-face spitting.
It is therefore probably the other way around. If the type of development work you're doing requires face-to-face spitting, you are not doing anything interesting anyway, and then it does not matter anyway, where exactly you are working on your next failure.
My employer would prefer I not walk out the building with the rather expensive test equipment necessary to debug our latest prototypes (which they would also prefer to keep in the building). Some of us software developers work on actual physical products, those which involve using a logic analyzer, oscilloscope, and JTAG pod for debugging. This equipment is too expensive to replicate for every engineer and has to be configured hands-on.
Different folks have different ideas of what is interesting to work on.
> Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, name it. The unicorn billions are all things that never needed face-to-face spitting.
All terribly boring to me. That's why I'm an embedded software engineer. Somebody has to write the code that keeps your airplane in the air.
Also there's a ton of really cool cities out there that are nowhere as expensive as SF/NYC/London/Toronto and that are just as fun, if not more (minus NYC), and way cheaper. And working remote, they're pretty much all within your reach.
-Human interactions: as mentioned, we are social animals and (mostly) enjoy being around others. You might not think this applies to you, but try staring at a computer and not speaking to anyone for a day. It can get old. -Similarly, being in the expensive cities means you also get to be around smart people like yourself, who are also flocking there. Sure, you could live somewhere super cheap, but then who would you share your v intelligent thoughts with? There's value in being able to bounce ideas, compare notes, etc. with real people in real life. -I've worked at companies who have employees in other geographies, but they pay these people less than they would in-house developers. If you're good at what you do and have the right connections, it can be lucrative to work remotely - but companies value face-time and might not be willing to pay as much if they know your living expenses are less. -Motivation: It can be tough to be motivated to get work done if you're living outside the confines of an office. If you can master the remote lifestyle, it offers a ton of flexibility, but a lot of people need more structure in order to be productive.
Working remotely and getting paid the same as you would in an expensive city works for some people, to be sure - and they crush it in terms of $$. But it comes down to a lot more than money - it's a certain personality type that can excel with this type of work, and without the right disposition it's not really worth the extra change.
This happens now in Limassol, Cyprus: crowds of developers, most having their own startups, started to flock there since 3 years ago from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine - it was always a country to keep offshore companies/accounts, so every rich developer in ex-USSR already been there and knew the place, but since 2014 it started to make sense to move physically as well - in Russia people escape propaganda and mass chauvinist hysteria, in Belarus economic crisis prompted government to jail IT business people to milk them on their money (then frequently releasing with no right to leave the country - in order to make them earn more, then milk again), in Ukraine they are simply leaving the unrest and crumbling infrastructure.
Since about last year it became a virtuous cycle because developers started to move in simply because it's a place with many developers already so it's easy to exchange ideas, and then investment funds joined. We are witnessing a small Silicon Valley in the making (of course, with probable limits of about a few percent of the real Valley). It already made Limassol a much more expensive place, rents on cheap apartments almost doubled in 3 years.
Developers want to be where developers are, and VCs want to be where there are many developers, and then more developers come where VCs are... and you get another 'most expensive city'.
Startups flock to where the capital is. Proximity to capital makes it easier to meet investors, get noticed and get funded.
Considering the massive shortage of developers in Israel, it really wouldn't surprise me to see deepening ties in the development community.
I love Sydney, it is (spiritually) my home town. But I wish the company would move to Wagga Wagga. I mean the place even looks like Mountain View.
In Europe "far" away from any big town can mean as little as 50km. Especially in Germany, you are never very far from some mid-size city which once dominated a independent principality.
Rhode & Schwarz, B/H/S and Siemens all have HQs within about 10 minute bike ride of where I used to live in Munich. Other companies in small towns were a somewhat more arduous bike ride away.
The companies I dealt with that were more than 100km from any big city were more into heavy industry. They are the Aussie equivalent of Newcastle or Gladstone, only with many more companies to go around.
Bringing up Limassol though, is not a valid argument. Limassol on its own has had a lot of rich people from Russia moving there permanently and in the past few years a lot of development went on there. The Marina or the pier etc makes it feel like you are in Miami of some sorts, so that definitely bumps the prices up and it has nothing to do with developers going there. Most rich people there didn't make money from tech but from illegal sources.
It's easy to see that Cyprus GDP is now lower (both nominal and real terms) than 10 years ago.
In 2013 over one weekend (while withdrawal and banking system was closed) everybody with some bigger asset lost half of the money they had in banks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%9313_Cypriot_financ...
Amazon/Facebook/Google/Microsoft doesn't let its workers work from home in general. A lot of tech companies don't as well. So moving to CheapSmallTown means when losing the job still having to go back to ExpensiveTechHub to network and find a new job. So might as well stay in ExpensiveTechHub just to be sure.
Imagine if all those large tech companies and others allowed working from home as a default. I think that would be a sizeable economic and cultural shift. It might revitalize various part of the country, small cities and towns. It might reduce congestion, real estate prices in coastal cities.
I work from home and love it. But yeah I am still living next to a tech hub because chances are if I switch jobs I might not necessarily have a choice of working from home.
Speaking from experience, I'm much more relaxed working from Bali, and I get paid only 20% less than I did in SF. Instead of spending 35% of my net pay on rent, I only spend 2.9% and have a higher quality of life in general.
When all your hard earned money goes to just maintaining social status or staying in a trendy neighbourhood, what have you got to show for it?
Out of curiosity, did you start your current job while in SF and then moved? Or did you find the job while you were already overseas? If the latter, was the hiring process remote too?
When negotiating a salary, don't let your current location define your salary because in a couple of months you could be in London, SF, NYC or Tokyo.
They're not, but there's lots of other large-to-midsize tech companies out there that people don't mention when they mention the Big Four, because they're mostly the same. They're in the same locations, and work largely the same.
>You could very well have a higher upside working at a small, remotely friendly company, from Chiang Mai or Bali where the cost of living is 1/15th of SF, and still have a relative mass of expats doing similar things.
The problem here is: what happens when you get laid off? Now you're screwed, because you weren't getting paid much (you say you only get 20% of SF salaries; that won't even leave you enough left over to move back to the States and make a down-payment on a house or a 2-month deposit and 1st month's rent), so you don't have any savings worth anything, and now you're unemployed and have zero hope of a new job in some foreign country.
This is why attempts to "insource", or locate tech companies in cheaper parts of the US, never work out well. You can't get many workers to pack up and take a huge risk moving to the middle of nowhere, where there's only one employer. If they get laid off in a month or two, they're really screwed. So people stay in the tech-hub cities where there's plenty of other jobs in case something goes wrong. It's all about minimizing risk.
There are even requests around the geographical region, which I consider if I hadn't had a family and mortgage.
I can utilize all the cutting-edge technologies developers on the coasts think they're privy to, too.
This flyover mentality gets me so worked up. It's really from a pre-internet era.
I can see your argument for doing so in another country (relocation, other added expenses vs. U-Haul across the country), but I'm making the assumption there's more than one fruit farmer there, too.
I'm sorry, but I simply do not feel comfortable taking on a giant risk by signing up for a house mortgage in a city where I will be forced to move out if something goes wrong with my job. I don't think I'm the only person who thinks that way.
I worked at Facebook as a software engineer in the Menlo park office and I used to work from home at least several times a month. I'm pretty sure google allows you to this as well. They don't allow you to do this permanently however.
It's also really convenient when I'm working on something really complicated for a client and I can take a 10 minute bus ride downtown to discuss in person.
Could I save literally thousands of dollars a month living somewhere else? Totally, but it wouldn't be the same.
A university dorm?
I also enjoy working with a team in person, many of which became my friends. If I loose my job here, there are plenty of interesting alternatives to choose from. The city also offers a lot of non-work related things that i would not want to miss at this point in my life (no, it's not clubs)
After having worked 5+ years from home I am really happy about my decision to have moved to a big city (Berlin) 2 years ago and giving up working at home, it literally changed my life.
Commuting by car < Commuting by train < No commute < Commuting by bike
While the individual trip is only about 6km, this way i do 60+km per week which amounts to somewhere around 2500-2800km per year and i usually go pretty fast so that i am quite exhausted after 20 minutes. Last year i watched my eating habits and it was pretty easy to loose 10kg of weight and keep it at that level only due to cycling.
It also is a great time to think in the morning and even better to relief stress after work. The only upside to taking public transport would be being able to read, but in the usually crowded trains with 1 stop where i need to change trains, the uninterrupted reading time would be pretty small anyway.
> Chiang Mai is very nice, but doesn’t have the Met, or steampunk masquerade parties or 50 foodie restaurants within a 15-minute walk.
That's true, I do miss museums, theater, and live music from my favorite bands. But there's some really fun events (Songkran is coming soon), you can find some good music, and there's a lot of really good restaurants.
If I had a lot more money, I would probably live in NYC, LA, Hong Kong, or Melbourne. But Chiang Mai is great for now.
Maybe I need to head south for the winter.
Losing Startcon to Sydney was one of my top reasons other than that international startups (particularly fintech) seem to gravitate towards Sydney.
Melbourne does have some noticeable startups - Carsales.com.au, realestate.com.au, envato, seek but I think there isn't enough done to phrase them. If you are in Melbourne however I'd recommend coming a Inspire9 pitch night or a SiliconBeach meetup. Finally Andrew Hyde's writing speaks of some of the strengths in Melbourne http://andrewhy.de/why-your-startup-should-visit-melbourne/
I understand some people enjoy it, I for one traded a 50% pay cut for the ability to live far from any big town with a smile on my face.
I can cycle without breathing exhaust fumes, I can go kayaking from my backyard, I can go fishing after work, I can grow my own food, I can have a dog without feeling like holding it prisoner in a town, I can offer a healthy and low stress environment to my family, I can watch the stars from my backyard,...
Just giving a bit of perspective, coming from a guy who made big money. In the end money is worthless if I'm dead from one of the many things that will end up killing me by living in a big town.
I love road cycling as a sport. IMHO cycling for pleasure sucks in cities, even ones with great cycling infrastructure.
The cycle paths are full of slow commuters calmly pootling their way to work|shops|date|whatever.
The roads in cities are full of distracted|incompetent|psychopathic drivers in motor vehicles all wanting to "punish" me for shaving my legs and wearing lycra.
The place for people like me is haring about in the lanes and hills of the sticks. :)
In cities that are renowned bike friendliness e.g. Amsterdam or Copenhagen most of the cycling is low speed on the excellent cycle paths. Most of the riders are on utility bikes in their everyday clothing (as opposed to dressing to go fast and get sweaty).
If people are just peacefully commuting at 20kph (12mph) I would feel a bit of an arse if I went hooning past on a time trial bike at 50kph (31 mph).
Editor's note: Actually I'd be over the moon if I could maintain a 31 mph average for 10 miles! :)
The small town I live in actually has pretty good segregated bike paths but I only use them when I'm commuting slowly and not when I'm training.
Off-topic, but LA really does have great public transportation. It covers nearly the entire metro area such that you can get pretty much anywhere and only have to trek a few blocks to catch a connecting metro line (whether that be bus, rail, or subway). The problem is you're not going anywhere fast.
I like Ventura Blvd in the Valley to make it to the beach. It is congested at points earlier on (east), but then it clears out. Venice is busy almost the entire stretch.
I mean, I don't expect you to do it, but personally, I like to save aggressively so that I can reach financial independence sooner.
You're right that I could take a higher paying job in the suburbs or in a rural area and save even more, but money isn't everything to me.
For completeness, the elementary school that I went to and that my kids will go to does not have or need metal detectors. I believe the security guard is armed. Are security guards outside the city completely unarmed? I have no point of reference for this.
That day will probably come. It might even be here, but I seriously doubt it. I think it still takes a lot of personal interaction and teamwork, and the tech for it is still clumsy, incomplete and annoying enough that it's just not good enough.
Are there any great companies built from the ground this way?
I make 125k/year with 15k bonus, good 401k/stock/health/etc. This is outside Indianapolis, where you can buy a nice 3k sq. ft. home for 250k.
To have the same size house where you live, how much would I have to make? I have done some math, it is well over 200k. Maybe you make that much?
I lasted 3 years, until I met my wife, and by then I was ready to move. We did.
Now, life in the suburbs, is slow. I feel somewhat disconnected and like I don't really belong to this community. My neighbor is a teacher, not a tech worker. I miss the buzz of the city, the energy. But, I'm saving money, and, working remotely is mostly positive (though I do yearn for office banter more and more).
Life I guess, is all about trade offs. Rarely have I found a situation that is entirely positive, or negative. Most, if you look closely enough, are a balance of good and bad. For me now in my life, the reassurance that I will be able to retire some day, is worth more to me than the excitement of the city. That may change... we shall see.
If it does change, I'll be lured back to the city for the exact reasons the article states. The city itself, is the draw. There's something about living in an urban environment, for some people, it's just a pace of life more resonant with their existence.
This is such a weird American phenomenon, the whole roommate thing. What on earth can make adults choose to share their home with a stranger? Why isn't there intense pressure for building many small apartments, rather than building larger apartments that are meant for roommates? Is it connected to the equally weird college dorm roommate system?
Why are people accepting a situation where they live together with someone they don't like? It's such an obvious recipe for misery!
Who perpetuates this system?
Why accept it? Westerners don't understand how their economies work to pass surplus value to the non-productive.
Why do you think it's a question of understanding, rather than a moral obligation to help others?
http://savingcommunities.org/docs/george.henry/helpunemploye...
Yes, the system (and the people who build and make up the system) decide to distribute wealth to 'non-productive' people. That's a good thing, exactly because charity of the 'productive' people is not reliable.
It's also not necessarily bad that some wealth is directed to rentiers, if otherwise the wealthy would have no incentive to use their wealth productively.
Of course, I'm still in my late 20s, so take this with a massive grain of salt. But if my salary doubled tomorrow, I still wouldn't give up my flatshare. I don't see myself wanting to leave it for another several years.
I also could afford to live on my own but I prefer to have roomates.
I live overseas,where as a foreigner a personal network is even more important that back home.
Having roomates makes my social life easier. No need to spend so much energy meeting new people outside. There are often people hanging out in the living room. I rarely feel lonely and often meet new cool people,at home.
Have you ever been to Asia? It's extremely common in China/Korea/Japan
The flat sharing / house sharing movement is very young there and only applies to a very small number of young people.
I think you're just sheltered; in every country in Europe that I lived in or had friends live in (Poland, UK, Portugal), students and young professionals flatshare. Or live with their parents, but it comes out to the same thing. If you're not already independently rich, you can't afford a single bedroom flat on your own.
The simple fact is that a two bedroom flat split two ways is always going to be cheaper than two single-bed flats. There's obvious efficiency in using the space effectively - no point in every single person having their own kitchen, bathroom, living room. Also, it makes sense that most flats built are 2-bedroom or bigger; that way they can be used both as flatshares for young people, and flats for families.
You don't have to live with someone you don't like - you get to pick your flatmates.
http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKMA...
When a college student talks about their roommate, yeah that's the freaky situation of being an adult and not having your own bedroom.
But on other contexts it just means what I would call a "housemate". You're not actually in the same room.
(my uni had both twin and single rooms, and the twin was maybe 60% of the price)
Sure, it's not non-existent, I have many friends who have done it at some point in their lives, but it was always with existing friends. Advertising for a roommate, i.e. inviting a stranger to share your place is very unusual.
People's expectations of privacy are simply much higher.
The cheapest form of housing for college students is one where you share a kitchen and a living room with a bunch of other people, but everyone has their own private bedroom and bathroom with a door that locks. College dorms is just not done.
It is possible to rent a room in someone else's apartment, but usually in that arrangement the apartment is built such that the part that's rented out is a bit more off, has it's own bathroom, and has its own front door.
1) Americans have a self-hating working class.
2) American home-owners are politically organized, and constantly lobby to prevent the construction of both new single-family houses and apartment buildings in general.
That's over-generalizing. Many locations in the USA have sensible zoning. SF is the exception.
[1] -- http://www.vox.com/2016/6/16/11948630/somerville-zoning-ille...
Every 5 or 10 years an entirely new development emerges.
Any hindrance occurs to municipalities without room to grow. And for city zoning, it doesn't appear they have an issue "building up" instead of out.
1. Live with parents
Not something most people want to do past a certain age.
2. Live with friends
People seem to be moving abroad more these days leaving you with friends all over the world, but possibly none currently in the city you live in.
3. Live with significant other
Fine until the relationship ends and someone needs to move.
4. Live with strangers
You meet new people, if you don't like them it's easy to just move somewhere else and try again.
The '6 of us in a 3 bed' thing is insane and unrelated to the living with strangers point.
Where are you from that sharing a home with strangers is such a strange concept? Who have you lived with instead? If you were able to afford your own place you're either very lucky or live somewhere very inexpensive because even in smaller cities that's not an option for most people.
Sweden.
When I went to university, I had a student apartment. It was cheap and tiny, 18m^2. There was a slightly cheaper student housing option where you would share a living room and a kitchen with other people, but in those everyone has their own private bedroom and bathroom with their own front door. Some of my friends rented regular, small apartments in the city. Some shared apartments, but always with existing friends, people they'd known for a while and knew they'd get along with.
As you exit university, you lose your student housing, but if you have a job you can usually afford a small apartment, a studio or a 1BR. The amount of people sharing an apartment with others at this age is even lower.
Eventually, most people get into a relationship, and move into a larger home as needed, and this is where the attitudes between the US and Sweden are the most similar, if you have a family and kids, most people get a house of their own.
One difference between the US and Sweden though is that there is strong political pressure for construction companies to build small apartments. In the US there's political pressure to build low-income housing and accessible housing, but for some reason no pressure for making sure everyone gets their own apartment?
That's still leaps and bounds from the American custom of advertising for a roommate, interviewing a bunch of candidates, and then picking one. There's a reason the "crazy roommate" is a trope used in American TV and cinema.
That is completely alien to me. :-)
> Living by yourself quickly becomes very lonely
Funny, that's a complaint I don't think any of my friends and acquaintances have had. I'm just gonna chalk that up to culture as well.
When I was in my 20s, I lived alone in a nice place, as a developer I could afford it.
Now in my 30s I live in a shared apartment in London, I can technically afford to live alone, but I'd rather save the money (it would be twice as expensive).
It's not as bad as I had feared, and the community aspect can be interested, it can also be very bad if you end up with the wrong people (noise, ...)
All in all, I don't regret it.
So, in the case of "6 of us in a 3 bedroom apartment", then yes, they shared rooms, but it's not always the case (I would've expected 3 people in a 3 bedroom apartment). Perhaps parent meant 3 couples (6 people)?
There's a really simple one: lack of funds to afford their own place.
Also, plenty of roommates are not strangers. I've lived with my brother and one of my best friends from high school, and really only lived with a true stranger during my first year of college, the first year I lived in Austin, and the first 9 months I lived in the Bay Area.
> Who perpetuates this system?
Low-cost rental housing generally isn't a good financial proposition.
After leaving university, and moving on to a full time position in a suburb I feel completely disconnected. I didn't attend a ~huge~ school, but the sense of community was there. The lack of this feeling has been hard to explain, but this comment explains it very well.
I'm not sure if I will(or can) ever do something about this feeling either.
Why? Suburban life might be the worst social ill the US has ever faced. If you're starting the mental spiral downward, pick up and move. Plenty of jobs in plenty of cities that aren't wildly expensive, but still are walkable (in certain areas) and have things going on and a normal community.
I know some folks thrive in the suburbs, but I really think it's the single worst long-term policy decision any country has made in terms of the damage it did to community and a sense of togetherness.
I travel a decent amount now, and I am absolutely amazed at how some supposedly "destitute" communities seem far happier than the faux-rich suburban communities in the US. In my opinion the social stratification and divisiveness we're seeing today (e.g. a lack of a sense of togetherness) is directly due to a generation completely cut off from each other in the pursuit of getting away from undesirables and giant houses.
I completely understand folks who would prefer to live in a rural community - but those who prefer to live in the suburbs I just cannot understand. It seems like the absolute worst of both worlds to me.
Suburbs are fundamentally alienating and isolating in my experience. The physical distance between houses limits the number of people you're likely to meet and interact with in your locale. The need to drive everywhere disconnects you from your surroundings and community, as opposed to walking and biking whose physical aspect creates a tangible connection with your surroundings. Disputes with neighbors over relatively minor issues get amplified by concerns over property values to the point of creating permanent rifts. Freedom of thought and nonconformity are generally viewed skeptically if not outright suspiciously. Strangers are distrusted by virtue of non-residents having no reason to be in the neighborhood, ever. Overall my experience is they foster a cloistered, narrow-minded, distrustful mentality that is intellectually stifling and culturally toxic.
That's a bit over the top, but it is useful to able to quickly identify people with no good reason to be in the neighborhood. People can go their whole life without mugging or burglary.
As soon as I graduated I moved to NYC. I loved it, it was the most alive I've ever felt in my life. I lived there for 4 months and every day after work I walked around and marveled at a city so massive and stimulating that it didn't seem real. However, I was soon broke. Defeated, with credit cards maxed out, I got a plane ticket home with my last 300 bucks.
I lived in a midwestern suburb for about three years after that, close to home and bored out of my skull after living something like NYC.
When I built up some savings and experience I jumped again, this time for what I considered a happy medium between the two lifestyles, to Austin TX. So far so good here.
One day I will jump one last time to Silicon Valley, just to see what it's like. From there, having lived in all the places I really want to experience, I'll choose my final destination and settle down there.
It’s also one of the places in the world where you will get the most infrastructure, meaning technological infrastructure but also political, democratic, social, medical, legal, education and even cognitive infrastructure.
Yes, you get what you pay for.