I wonder how much goodwill Google could have generated by locating this hub in say Orlando or Des Moines.
Even if they spent 150k per engineer in relocation costs (1 time fee), it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t make that up in terms of cheaper real estate and lower salaries.
There were obviously some benefits in choosing New York City (and I realize it’s an expansion technically), but still, it’s so......unimaginative.
Would have been a great contrast to Amazon’s bait and switch yesterday.
Well, problem with Orlando etc., as opposed to NYC is it would be harder to attract elite talent there. In fact, it will be hard enough to attract talent at NYC when most tech companies are still in SV.
> Even if they spent 150k per engineer in relocation costs (1 time fee), it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t make that up in terms of cheaper real estate and lower salaries.
Are you suggest that elite talent wants lower salaries in the Midwest or Florida as long as they can get a one time relocation payout?
Google might save support staff salaries, but I don't think they'll save engineer salaries with your plan, they might even have to boost them.
You'd definitely have to boost them. I feel like it's always grossly understated in these sorts of threads just how much better quality of life is in a dense city like NYC. Access to culture, to food, to public transportation, to other job opportunities is hard to put a dollar amount on. There's a reason so many people moves to places like NYC and not isolated towns in the midwest.
Personally, I have the opposite opinion. I took a pay cut to leave Seattle ( I lived in Chicago before that, I've lived in dense metro areas for many, many years now) so I could go live in a smaller town.
I can actually afford a house. My dog has a yard to play in. I haven't been mugged since I left! No one uses my doorstep as a bathroom. My neighbors actually come say hi to me and are invested in forming relationships knowing I won't just up in move in the next year due to housing costs. We have decent enough restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, pool halls, movie theater, mall, etc, and if I really want to, I am within driving distance of the city (edit: for a day trip, no way in hell would it work for me as a commute). Yet, I haven't been back since I left.
I think it's more nuanced than your comment indicates. You might be surprised how many people might take up an offer from Google to move to the boonies (I'm at least one).
If you're within driving distance of Seattle, you're still in the catchment area for working there though. The equivalent would be living in New Jersey or Connecticut or Long Island and working in New York City - which hundreds of thousands of people do.
I didn't mean to come off quite as harsh as that. There are plenty of goal sets that align well to being outside of the city; but I do think that y'all are the minority. When playing the numbers in trying to staff huge multi thousand head campuses catering to a specific minority doesn't add up.
One thing to point out about the NYC metro area is that there is a ton of land surrounding it with reasonably priced homes in safe areas with less than a 45 minute commute by public transit, where in the Bay Area and Seattle, the waterways are far larger, and transportation options more restricted. Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and a good school district that takes you directly to the office.
> Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and a good school district that takes you directly to the office.
A train which sometimes get you there in 45 minutes, sometimes in 60 minutes, sometimes gets cancelled because of (Amtrak signal problems | disabled Amtrak equipment in the Hudson tunnel | overhead wire damage | $ PROBLEM_OF_THE_DAY).
NJT is a mess but Metro North is pretty great. I walk to the train and then walk GCT to our office on Park. I grew up in Queens and my commute to Manhattan is shorter now when I live 30 miles outside the city. But I also pay for that with Westchester taxes.
It has been going slowly downhill since I moved here two years ago. I'm glad I don't have to go into Penn any longer. Hoboken has its own problems, but at least the NJT cancellations are rare and the trains usually get there within 5 minutes of when they are supposed to.
Reasonably priced homes within 45 minutes of NYC, via train, are definitely not a thing. You're also not even counting our absurd taxes in places like Morristown, Montlcair, Fair Lawn, etc.
>Within huge portions of nearby suburbs, you can buy a sizable 3+ bedroom house for <400k in a town with a train stop and a good school district that takes you directly to the office.
Not to be a ass, but where? And please don't just point out a home with no pictures you just found on Zillow, but a place where you've actually been to which has decent property taxes, decent schools, and is safe? And actually a 45 minute commute, not 45 minutes if you ignore the 20+ minutes it takes to drive your car from home to a train station and pay $50+/month to park for a reserved spot.
I ask this because I used to live in a NYC area highrise and always used to think over the about the seemingly fantastic deals in the suburbs. Then I started looking and realized real-estate websites and Google Maps commuting are a far cry from reality.
Look, you wont find this in the towns with the absolute best schools, and it is only possible to have this sort of commute if you work on top of the lower manhattan path station or penn station. Additionally, prices could've have risen since I last checked, and property taxes in NJ will always be high. But towns ranging from Maplewood to Cranford fall in this price range. Note when I say sizable I'm talking the ~2000 sqft range also.
Maplewood is a great example of homes that look amazing at first glance on real estate websites, but the high property taxes cause your mortgage payment to jump significantly.
Here's a great example. 36 Ball Ter, Maplewood. $550K, ~2200 sqft, interior looks newly renovated, looks really nice in pictures. $15.5K(!!) in taxes. With 20% down you're still looking at $3.5K/Month(includes property taxes) on a 30 year mortgage.
If you look at the price history on Zillow or Trulia, it looks like it was flipped (I think that's when the interior renovation was done) late 2017/early 2018, and the price went up to $750k and has plummeted since then. So the property tax assessment is probably on the pre-renovated value, not the renovated value. So whomever purchases this house can expect a fat tax increase when the town reassess the value.
Also, look at the prices between the East and West side of Maplewood. The East side is fairly close to areas that lots of people would prefer not to live in due to safety concerns.
Again, I'm not trying to be an ass or attack you. I'm just trying to present some real numbers so people have a realistic view when they think the greater NYC area is a place you can escape to when you want access to NYC with a medium CoL. NYC is a very high CoL area and moving to the suburbs can hurt (e.g. terrible commute) in unexpected ways, and you still have a high CoL compared to the majority of country.
Oh for sure, NJ home prices do not tell the whole picture, but the truth is that even with these high taxes, a Software Engineer at a top company should easily be able to afford to live there, even with a spouse that doesn't work.
3.5k a month is affordable to people who make 130k+ a year, which is less than a new grad makes at Google, where this is absolutely cheaper than anything within a comparable commute to google offices in the bay area at all, or around Seattle in school districts of similar quality.
New York Metro is in no way cheap, and I was never trying to make that argument, just that it can be substantially cheaper than the existing major tech hubs.
No one I know who commutes from outside NYC/Hoboken/Jersey City into NYC has a door-to-door 45 minute commute. 45 minutes might get you to the train station (if the train is running on time), but unless you work right next to Penn Station or Grand Central, it takes at least another 10-15 minutes to get to your desk.
My parents commute from NJ west of the parkway and when things aline the commute is 45 minutes (of course things often don't align). The key piece is that you need to live and work right near the various stops.
My comment is that in less desirable locations people need to be paid more to be there if they don't have to be. The cost of living is not really relevant.
In particular, if one anticipates returning to a pricey location later in life (e.g. needing to take care of elderly relatives there), one has to save for retirement at a higher level than if one can stay in the cheaper place forever.
Cost of living comparisons used to justify salary reductions rarely account for such scenarios.
With that said, the numbers can still work out to make it a good financial deal, it's just less automatically true.
I'm not sure I'm convinced. To give an example a recruiter once tried to get me to move to some place in India (2002). He told me I'd be making $30k a year which was 10x what locals made so I'd be living like a king. Even if that was true that I could live like a king for that salary in India all I could think about is how I'd be stuck there because I'd have no money to leave to a more expensive place in the future.
Yep - this is an extreme example, but the main reason it's a bad idea.
If you live in a high cost of living area, but are okay living with roommates you can save a ton of money. More than enough to make up the difference compared to living in a low cost of living area.
You also get better quality of life and a lot more opportunities - meeting people for work/friends/dating. It's also better to have a high salary in order to more easily keep a high salary.
I think you also learn more faster from increased exposure to talented people. I grew up in Buffalo which is a nice and very cheap place, but there was nobody to learn from.
Can't speak for anyone else but I gladly take a hit in my disposable income (it's not that much of a hit) if it means I can live in place where a lot of interesting stuff is happening aside from work (Berlin, NYC, Amsterdam, etc.). I don't need a big flat and I have few expensive hobbies.
Maybe it will be different in my thirties and forties but right now I want to either live in a (cool) city to work on exiting projects or be travelling. It may sound pretentious to some, but it's what I want.
I would imagine quite a few people feel similarly. In that way a campus in New York City makes sense I believe.
> People who understand the lower salary is easily made up for by lower living costs.
But it's not for lots of people who can afford positive savings in both locations, unless the absolute pay difference is less than the absolute difference in CoL at the level they would maintain in each place; even people who would prefer the lifestyle and environment of a cheaper (often rural) place often spend most of their working life in an area with a more robust economy and higher pay and CoL to increase savings, and then retire to the cheaper place. (A lot of the net domestic migration out from CA is, I suspect, that, as people executing that strategy reach retirement.) And that's not to say anything of how that utilities balance for people who actually prefer the lifestyle and environment of the more expensive location.
Not many people want to work in those places though. And I say this as an engineer at Google living and working in Manhattan. NYC has a huge draw to it that most other places don't. Good luck attracting top talent to Des Moines or Orlando. Way more would rather work in NYC. You don't want to be in a one-company town either; if you left Google in Orlando, where else could you work without moving? There's no credible competition at the same tier.
If there are good, seasoned engineers in Silicon Valley that can't pass the Google interview, they sure as hell can't find very many in Orlando or Des Moines.
I was in Des Moines a couple of weeks ago to do interviews for our office there. The talent pool of people who would want to work in Des Moines is very local, and the quality is far lower than in bigger metro areas. (the distribution curve skews right) Anyone with talent there tended to want to move out of the area. We ended up postponing our hiring.
Des Moines favors people that want to settle down and have a quiet, comfortable suburban life. It is a nice, clean, orderly place with lots of new infrastructure. The landscape is pristine and beautiful. It has all the creature comforts you need. Nothing wrong with that--if anything, Des Moines is a hot real-estate market right now, including surrounding areas like Ankeny--but by definition that doesn't attract ambitious people.
You can have a good career in Des Moines working for big insurance companies etc. (and many do). But it is not a hot house for the upper end of tech talent. You're looking at a different range of talent there.
>Des Moines favors people that want to settle down and have a quiet, comfortable suburban life.
I'm 24, but that is definitely what appeals to me. The mere thought of working in NYC or other tech hubs is nauseating. I'd feel totally out of place culturally.
NYC is such a big city that you can find everything and everyone here. You're more likely to feel out of place culturally in a small city if you can't find your subculture there, whereas in NYC your subculture is guaranteed to exist. How many hacker groups, meetups, and conventions does random small city have, for example? Or gaming? Or anime? Or comics? We've got all that in spades.
By definition those who don’t want density aren’t located densely enough in a place that a high end tech company can relocate to.
But the old IBM campuses outside of NYC are actually like this. They are usually one or two hours from NYC, in really leafy forested areas...basically country side. People commuting from the city to those places (eg Yorktown in West Chester) are the first ones google attracted with their In-City office, they were extremely successful just because they were in the city and IBM wasn’t.
The problem, though, is that the density outside of cities doesn't exist to support the talent pool required for a large office of a major multinational corporation. By the time you've added enough people to have a sustainable population for the highest tier of a given industry -- which includes multiple alternative employers plus the whole attendant service industry -- you end up with a city.
Of course I accept that not everyone wants to live in a city. The point is, though, that you have to make serious sacrifices if that's your first priority -- you need to either accept a long miserable commute, or acknowledge that you're limiting your ability to grow into the top tier of your chosen profession. Cities have very real beneficial network effects for businesses.
But you seem to want to work at a big tech company and exactly what do you mean out of place culturally?
I as a white brit enjoyed working (London UK) for an Arab company which was incredibly diverse - just with I had take a language class at night school.
Not OP, but likely city life vs countryside stuff. Cafes/theatres/etc vs fishing/hiking/woodworking/whatever. Lakeside BBQ in the woods with no people around vs busy park. Everybody-knows-everybody vs big city anonimity. And all that stuff that isn't related to skin color or ethnicity.
FWIW, when I was 24 my dream was to move to a small house in the woods of Vermont, and I was sure I'd never leave New England (I grew up in a small town between Lexington and Concord). Moved to Silicon Valley because I also wanted to found a startup and the Bay Area is realistically the only place for that, and besides, Google had just offered me a job and was paying for my relocation.
Don't underestimate how much your culture can change, particularly if you're young and go into life with an open mind. It's one thing if you have no desire for whatever might bring you to a big city, but if you do have that desire but are stopped because of the nauseating feeling of how your lifestyle & culture might change, that feeling does pass.
I am of a completely opposite opinion, at 24 (now), I wouldn't want to stay in any sparsely populated place.
The likes of NY, Boston are my perfect city. Everything I need is by my doorstep, don't need to own a car (or use it regularly) and can find not-unreasonable rents if I have roommates and don't stay in cheaper locations. (eg. Allston in Boston)
I work in a Boston suburb and can't imagine staying in such a drab place, unless I had a family, kids and all. Almost everyone there is older than me and almost entirely invested in family living. Everything from conversations to activities lack any sense of freshness and feel routine. Don't get me wrong, people seem to be happy there. But, a lot of it hinges on their family and social relationships built with people over many years.
I don't see myself having either of those things at least till I am in my mid 30s. Even then, I would probably live in a condo where human density is larger, rather than suburban sprawls.
In my experience, suburban living comes at the turning point of the exploration-exploitation curve.
People who want to explore, will stay in urban locations and see out new experiences .... Until they start feeling good about a certain local optima and "settle down" on it.
My hypothesis is that tech workers usually slog it out in till they get a job (usually in their early-mid twenties) and then start the exploration phase, that may have come sooner for other majors. As a result they prefer staying in cities for longer and till an older age than other majors.
I have noticed this among my peers, but of course it is anecdotal and have no idea how well it will generalize.
There is more demand for working in NYC than is currently met by existing tech offices, that simply isn't the case in other metro areas.
The real problem is that Google is choosing to expand in the neighborhood they are currently in, where the same applies to Amazon should the Long Island City rumors be true. Regional transportation infrastructure already prioritizes midtown and the financial district, and there are tons of distressed areas regionally, that still certainly do benefit from a growing economy all around.
How many Google engineers do you think would be willing to move to the midwest or Florida? Especially in return for lower pay (and a one-time bonus).
There are several cities I'd be willing to reloc to -- Florida and the Midwest are not in that list (not even Chicago, due to the winter weather). SF, Seattle, Portland, NYC, Boston are at the top of the list. Maybe San Diego or Austin or the DC area.
I have the same opinion, and actually, one could say that many people are accepting lower net income in exchange for living in and near big cities, because for many the higher rents and decrease in living conditions are not made up for by the higher income.
High quality talent are attracted to elite cities because other high quality talent is already there. It's easier to hire and retain the top 1% of engineers in an elite city because they're already working for other top companies. Also New York is closer to research centres of the universities compares to Orlando. This means access to students and academics.
If it's going to make NYC a major engineering hub, on a similar scale as Mountain View, then it's a huge deal. If it's going to be mainly non-technical roles, then meh.
There's 8.6 million people in the NYC legal limits, over 20 million in it's greater metro, and a way more diverse economy. You'd need waaaaay more tech to get anywhere close to SV, which just isn't that big population wise.
NYC is arguably the largest global center for the entire services sector/post industrial economy. It can become a tech hub far larger what exists today in the bay area, and still not become a monoculture. The only monocultural aspect that happens to exist in NYC is that it's an incredibly expensive place full of very ambitious and financially successful people (400,000 millionaires live in manhattan alone).
NYC is the largest city in the nation and is the main hub of many industries including finance, fashion, network TV, publishing, and advertising. The population of the overall NYC metropolitan area is 24 million.
The only way to change it into as much of a monoculture as Silicon Valley would be to add tens of millions of tech workers, without adding any attendant employees to service industries. Not gonna happen.
NYC is one of the most diverse cities in the world. There are 800 languages alone spoken in Queens. NYC will never become a monoculture because it can never price out immigrants, otherwise the city would die, unless they want to replace cheap labor with robots. Who else is going to make all the avocado toasts, bus, drive taxis, deliver seamless, and serve drinks in the city that never sleeps?
The big difference, in my perception, between New York and the Bay Area is the availability, diversity and public interest in the arts. That brings people together in a unique, cerebral way and helps digest emerging monocultures.
I've lived and worked in a fair few cities and the two cities which spring to the top of my mind which can take in a significant influx of talent/people/work from various industries and not be "monopolized" by a single industry are London and NYC.
I actually haven't come across any other broadly comparable cities in these sort of metrics.
This coupled with the Amazon news is starting to get distressing. With the amount of companies that copycat them it’s like the rich are getting richer and the economic benefits are still going to be concentrated only in the most affluent cities. The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them but it appears nobody can come up with a business plan. We’re truly heading for Elysium.
There's another option: just build new housing in the cities that have a proven track-record of economic dynamism. There are several factors that I believe these "winner take all" cities have that many smaller cities either can't or refuse to implement. This includes not just a tolerating, but welcoming immigrants; robust public transit investment; and a great education system.
Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent. This limits large new offices to large metro areas (5M+ people)
People don't want to relocate to cities where there aren't multiple job possibilities - you lose your job/hate it and don't want to have to relocate to find a new job or you want to move but your spouse can't find a job there because their industry isn't well represented there.
This leads to a reinforcement cycle where new jobs are created in a city, people flock there, found the next generation of companies, new jobs, more people fleeing less attractive cities and so on...
Things that can happen that could break this cycle include - new industries emerging (like tech in the 90s), poor governance, infrastructure in an area forcing companies to find alternatives (like bay area right now), new skills coming into demand and companies establishing offices to take advantage of that (e.g. Pittsburg emerging as an AI hub, Seattle for 'cloud' skills etc)
> Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent
This seems especially silly. There are almost limitless people who would like to get one of the FAANG co's on their CV. They'd gladly relocate and benefit from reasonable property prices for a year or three. Google or Netlix are hardly going to struggle to attract talent if they decide to open an office in some rural backwater.
You'd be surprised how attached people are to their spouses or partners. Doesn't matter how badly you want to work at Google, if your spouse is an IP attorney or VP at an academic hospital, as a family you just can't go moving to the middle of nowhere. It's not ALL about being able to work at Google. There's a lot more going on in making these decisions. (At least there is for the type of people that Google would be interested in.)
Much better to be in that NYC-Boston-DC corridor where high powered opportunities abound in multiple sectors. Or SF. Or Chicago. Etc. But trying to move a lot of these types of couples to, say, Lincoln Nebraska, is just asking for trouble. The spouses or partners are definitely not going to go for that.
Because people are attached to their family and friends and also most don't realize that any able body person with an IQ of 100 and a decent work ethic could easily make six digits if they relocated to the right area.
Where could any randomly selected person from the upper 50% of the population by IQ move and earn >$100,000? Even with your caveats, though at that pay I do wonder why “able bodied” is important.
You go to the best college you can get into, wherever it is, and then to the best job you can get, wherever that is. Our city was okay, but our school system and community values were not calibrated to produce contentment with mediocrity.
You might pass on opportunities for social stability reasons in middle age, but as a 22-year-old you jump without hesitation.
People sometimes migrate back when their own kids are school-aged.
That's now a small minority of a minority. It's more usual for just one partner to have the especially high powered career. Even more so after starting a family.
For those that have both then sure, it's more nuanced and may come down to which of the two has the better future chances, or to make different decisions. Most potential workers will not be in that situation at all.
> It's more usual for just one partner to have the especially high powered career. Even more so after starting a family.
I believe the few high profile people who actually make the big decisions will usually have a partner who has a high profile career as well. Those key people wont move because their partner wont move.
I don't know about that. The two most common spouse occupations, of people I knew at Google in NYC, were lawyer and some sort of financier. Often (more than a few of those I knew) the spouse made more money and Google was effectively daycare for the other.
And in hotbeds like NYC, with the opportunities all over town, there's little career reason to go somewhere else. If Google left NYC, they'd lose most of their engineering team to other tech firms in the city.
The draw of NYC is also at least somewhat unique. I went to grad school with a lot of NY natives. A lot of them really cannot imagine living anyplace else. What? You can't do X at 3am? Inconceivable.
As someone who lives in New York City, that rings true to me. I remember being taken aback the first time I visited a smaller town and heard the ice cream shop was closed at 8 pm on a Sunday. It took a period of adjustment before I realized I was the odd one :)
Right out of school? Maybe. My first job, I did indeed not really consider location at all. And I would not have lived in the city I took the job long term and moved when I left the job after 3 years, albeit to go back to school which had been more or less my plan from the beginning in any case.
In addition to the reasons you give, there's also whether you like a place. I might (or might not) be willing to make some tradeoffs for a locale that's particularly desirable for recreational opportunities and so forth. But not for an exercise in creating a new city, revitalizing one, etc.
I’m sure Google (etc) could lure a lot of young, single folks out to the hinterlands for a year or two, but retention and recruiting further up the ladder would be awful.
Universities in the US, which—for historical reasons-are often located in rural areas, have similar problems. They solve this through “spousal hires.” This can range from merely coordinating interviews and offers across departments [0] to creating entirely new positions, or even tenure lines, for a rockstar’s spouse.
This can work relatively well for universities, but I’ve never heard of companies doing anything similar. I wonder if you could even get a set of companies to agree to preferentially hire their employees’ spouses, so there’s a more diverse set of options.
[0] The university often kicks in some money so that both departments will be happy with (say) their number three picks, instead of history hiring an unattached rockstar and chemistry getting no one.
Happened to a prof in my university just this year. Had offers from top universities & labs for tenure in CS, but stayed in our rural college town because of his SO.
No there aren't. It's the kind of move that sounds highly desirable until you actually start considering it seriously. Notably: what happens when you get tired of your current work, or you get laid off, or something else comes in between you and your current company? If there are no comparable companies around the area, you're stuck accepting shittier work, or uprooting your life.
I relocated from the UK to California and then Zurich to work at Google. I wouldn't have taken the offer if they said - "you can only work at Google if you agree to work in Alabama". Once you're in Google, it's pretty easy to move around between offices, and yet people aren't tripping over themselves to move to small offices in small cities with a small range of projects to work in.
Don't underestimate the power of network effects and critical mass. The people good enough to get into FAANG also have the abundance of options to specify where they'd like to live and work.
"Things that can happen that could break this cycle include"
Also: universities, new natural resource discoveries, natural disasters, different regulatory environments, developments in transportation.
I have a hunch that the North Coast of Canada is going to become a huge boom town within my lifetime, but it's likely to take a couple decades, and I don't yet know where the major cities will be. Am tempted to take a Northwest Passage cruise to find out, though.
I live at 55°N for 25 years and counting, as well as some time in a comparable climate (St. Petersburg), the wombo combo of very low temperatures in winter and constantly high humidity (temperatures are feeling way colder than with <50% humidity) with addition of low sunshine hours is not attractive one.
I'm just assuming that global warming is going to be as bad or worse than current predictions and that the effect will be felt even more severely at high latitudes. If the arctic sea ice all melts the Arctic Circle may be the new Northern Europe. 20,000 years ago New England was all under glaciers, while now it's a pretty reasonable place to live.
I hate to be that guy, but if it’s this simple why hasn’t it been done?
And anticipating a specific class of answer: is it always political deadlock in America, or is there something more fundamental that would prevent this from working?
To some extent, it has been done. There are a lot of great public institutions of higher education throughout the country. I live in Indianapolis. It's not exactly an economic wasteland.
I recently received an offer from Apple for a remote software engineering role. Amazon will also hire remote employees for certain teams in AWS. And I’m aware of both Facebook and Google hiring remote employees (or allowing employees to become fully remote) if they’re excellent and the alternative is losing them.
It’s not an explicit policy and they don’t actively encourage it. But they’ll make it work for the right person - I agree though, don’t go into it thinking you’ll be remote. If you want to work remotely for very high compensation (close to FAANG but not exactly competitive), comsider working at a second tier public tech company like Salesforce or a strong unicorn like Stripe (both of which explicitly support it).
I wouldn’t consider myself an “older person” with “outdated visions.” But I still wouldn’t want to work with or be managed by someone working remotely.
That’s an unfair characterization. A lot of people, myself included, do not enjoy remote work. I did it for years and I’m over it. You might consider that there are valid argumemts both for and against working remotely.
Something big. Running a huge organization effectively is already really hard -- just look at how many companies do a terrible job of it -- and having a large percentage of WFH employees would just increase the difficulty even further.
I've encountered some well-run and successful companies that hire remote employees and the two things that seem to be common to them is that they're remote-first and remote-first from day one. Transitioning into either of those seems a bridge too far for most companies.
> Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent. This limits large new offices to large metro areas (5M+ people)
I wish more companies would do what TI did.
TI set up their headquarters in Richardson, TX, where there were very few people with any engineering background. So they opened their own university in order to farm talent, and once it got large enough, they had the state take it over from them. It became the University of Texas at Dallas, and it's now probably the most important university in the southwest for engineering and CS (I've heard the phrase "MIT of the southwest" before, but I don't want to call it that because I went to UTD and that's a bit of an exaggeration).
This isn't true in the slightest, the only people who will be this way are those who are unwilling to make sacrifices in terms of quality or amount of space within a certain location, in return for the desire to own. The regional home prices in the bay area are more than twice what they are in the greater NYC region.
"Googlers, hardly the gilded class" is a silly argument. SWEs can afford to buy in the Bay, and can in NYC too. $250-300k is enough to afford a $1.5m place.
Yes, many Google employees aren't engineers, and not everyone working there gets paid like one.
Curious why I got downvoted here. I was disagreeing with the post I was replying to. Did I come across in the opposite direction?
I was attempting to make the point that this statement would only possibly be true for those who insisted on living in Manhattan, and that it isn't even true for that segment.
Friend just bought a $400,000 one-bedroom co-op in Midtown East. He makes a low six-figure salary, and will have to be judicious about his spending for a few years. New York isn’t the Bay Area—we build supply to meet demand.
Well if your income is $133k/yr, then it would fit in the 3x annual income rule for housing affordability, which the typical sr eng at google now exceeds.
It’s one room! I think that 3x rule is supposed to be about space for perhaps a family and other normal requirements for most adults. Not digs for a twenty-year-old.
Also, one bedrooms are luxurious. Advice for anyone looking for an apartment in Manhattan: don't waste your time on one bedrooms, look for studios. You pay an unnecessary premium for the extra wall, and it ultimately just makes the space less usable. You can find larger, nicer, better located studios for much less than you'd be paying for a one bedroom.
People, Americans particularly, overestimate the space a human being needs to thrive. I know several families who are healthy and happy in two- and three-bedroom apartments. They pay reasonable rents uptown or a forty minute subway ride out of Manhattan in Jersey or Queens. That’s much better than almost any metropolis, where sprawl makes the density gradient gentler and thus commute times between cost zones longer.
Firstly, to be perfectly frank, you can get 2, 3 years into your first kid before a studio makes a practical difference over a 2-bedroom apartment. For the first chunk, keeping the crib in your bedroom for ease of care is pretty normal, and once the kid is mobile chances are they're going to be sneaking into your bed to sleep at every opportunity anyway.
Secondly, the average length of ownership of a house in the US is like 7.5 years. A lot of people never make it through their 30 year mortgage because they either move for work, their circumstances change and they need more or less house or their income changes and they can/can't afford a nicer, bigger house than they could before.
So living in a studio well into baby #1 before deciding to trade up to a larger place when it's time to look for the "good" schools or baby #2 is on the way is kind of a perfectly normal way to go about things?
This is honestly offensive, I grew up in manhattan, and tons of my friends growing up lived in very small spaces (families sharing studio apartments). The key difference is that the amenities that most people in the suburbs have within their own homes are available in shared spaces all around you.
It's also in Midtown, which is likely not an ideal situation for a family. Check Queens or Brooklyn with more ideal family situations (and still reasonably short commutes) and you'll get a lot more space for less money
My plan right now is to rent in the city, buy a cabin or getaway house upstate for 200k and move there when I get older. Hard part is just finding somewhere that doesn't suck.
Nonsense. Most Googler engineers (more than 5% of the workforce) will be making at least $200k take-home after five years or so. This kind of salary can easily pay for a $1.5M home purchase. That won't buy you a four-bedroom in Chelsea, but it can buy you a reasonable home further out. And that's assuming no contribution from your spouse.
Now they may choose to rent, as I do, but that's because there are some big flexibility advantages to renting compared to buying.
$200k/yr can "easily" pay for $1.5m home purchase? The general rule-of-thumb for how big of a mortgage you can afford is in the range of 2-3x your gross income. [1][2][3]. You're talking about a staggering 7.5 multiple, assuming no down payment. Yes you can accrue a nice down payment after a couple years with that salary, but it's hard to make a huge dent in $1.5m.
200k take-home in NYC is about 350k gross. And why on earth would we assume no down payment? Surely we have been saving some fraction of our income during the years prior to buying.
If you get the ideas of living in Manhattan out of your head, NYC is definitely more affordable than SF. So NYC does have the option of people just being able to move there.
The larger problem is how do the other cities compete at all in the future?
Smart cities are building out train based metro systems that connect their major universities and their airports to their downtown areas. (Houston for example). But that's REALLY expensive. It's not a coincidence that Houston, a city flooded with energy wealth, is one of the few cities pursuing such a strategy. They're one of the only cities that can afford it. What about everyone else? I think the other cities will need to get aggressive and creative about making themselves appeal to the bottom lines of tech companies.
If not, yeah, most will likely be left behind. Sad, but that's how the market works. Just ask Gary Indiana.
I worry about this as well. I wouldn't be surprised if SF, NYC, and DC encompass the majority of the country's wealth in a few decades.
It genuinely amazes me that remote tech jobs haven't taken off. I just can't fathom why—unless companies have honestly found that it doesn't work for some reason unknown to me. What other incentive could there be? You get good workers at a fraction of the cost. And with companies like Google and Amazon spreading out across the U.S., remote teleconferencing systems are already set up. Is it really that much different to have someone dialing in to Mountain View from Idaho rather than NYC?
Speaking as someone who does a fair amount of remote working, yes, videoconferencing is awful. I’ve worked at several different companies of different sizes and it’s always awful. The video quality is bad, audio is terrible, getting a meeting started takes forever.
These aren’t insurmountable problems, you just have to get used to a different way of working. It’s not remotely the same as working in the same office. Better in some ways, worse in others.
Google is one of the few companies with the resources to try to drastically improve the technology and fix this problem, but they instead decided just to double down on consolidating their staff in big offices. Obviously works for them but it’s a shame.
Edit to add: the above doesn’t necessarily preclude remote offices, but one of the problems is that it’s hard to get a good productive remote team started without a nucleus of strong local staff. It’s hard for a company like Google to open a big office in a new city without an established tech base, and videoconferencing tech doesn’t help much.
> Google is one of the few companies with the resources to try to drastically improve the technology and fix this problem, but they instead decided just to double down on consolidating their staff in big offices. Obviously works for them but it’s a shame.
I'm a googler, and this is completely wrong. Google absolutely wants to fix the remote work issue. Nearly every meeting room in the company is equipped with videoconferencing equipment, and "dialing in" is an accepted practice, with people occasionally dialing in from home being quite common. Hell, they sell their videoconferencing stuff to other companies even, so the monetary incentive is certainly there.
But fully remote work also introduces organizational problems that current tech, at least, does not overcome.
Agreed. There's something fundamentally different about contacting someone via a video conference versus the organic nature of a quick chat about something.
This puts remote workers behind quite a ways. My old team was partially located in NYC and partially located in the Bay Area. There was a major difference in inter and intra location interactions and it affected the team in some negative ways.
As a mostly remote worker, that's fair. Just yesterday, I happened to be in the office and bumped into someone and had a quick conversation about something that would otherwise have involved setting up meetings, etc.
Yes, you may be right. I guess what I’m trying to say is that some companies and organizations (Basecamp, Mozilla) embrace remote working and some discourage it, and Google is currently in the latter camp.
I know they use videoconferencing a lot and they even sell it, but they still co-locate teams and they still expect people to come into the office most days, right?
It’s surprising to me that Google in particular is anti-remote given that all their products are so internet-focused. Yes, it’s probably unfair to expect more from them than from others.
Things like teleconferencing usually isn't a problem as such. If you work in a large enough organization, you are essentially working remotely already. It is just that people misunderstand what is happening.
It used to be that jobs where distributed as every town had their own businesses, but the work itself was centralized as one business mainly served one area.
What has happened is that large companies can now distribute their work all over the planet without the need for local branches. All the action is at the headquarters and therefor jobs are being centralized.
You can compare this to, say, how we used to and now use e-mail.
> The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them
No they don't. Tax breaks aren't enough. One of the big reasons a lot of people really like NYC is that it's one of the few cities in the US that actually feels like a city. NYC is urbanist in a way that relatively few American cities are (and most of the other cities in this category are also big economic winners, like SF and Boston).
How many of those more conservative/cheaper US cities actually take walking/biking/transit over driving as a serious issue? Virtually none of them that I've seen, they put in token efforts at best; an unprotected bike lane here, a "technically counts as transit" bus stop there, but very little that really moves the needle or challenges the status quo.
Name one of these cities, and I'll show you how they're failing miserably on at least this front just by a quick look at Google Maps.
Is this a serious reply? Seattle has no shortage of high-paying tech jobs, and it's certainly not a cheap place to live, nor is it in any way conservative.
I wouldn't consider Portland to be a cheaper or more conservative US city, and it's still one of the better US cities at urbanism, sad as that is, but okay.
* The MAX has decent reach, but it's severely handicapped in capacity and speed by running at-grade. The Portland metro cheaped out there, and the result is a train system that's only good by American standards.
* Many of the MAX stops, you can go a block or three and hit single-family homes (mandatory single-family homes, I think). To spend billions on a transit system, and then intentionally handicap its usage by strictly limiting how many people can live nearby around its stations...that's just completely insane. What are they thinking? "Better make sure as few people as possible can actually use this enormous investment"?
* No bus lanes that I'm aware of, or at least few enough that a multiple-time visitor didn't see them, so buses are stuck in general traffic.
* Very few physically protected bike lanes, in spite of its reputation as a bike-friendly city. The sum total value of bike improvements prior to the Orange Line was I believe estimated at around 60m, which is probably like a hundredth of one percent of the value of the roads and other stuff built for cars.
* Despite ostensibly being a major city, most of the residential areas are zoned very low density.
* Those very low density areas also generally have no commercial/retail activity allowed, which particularly hurts walkability: part of walkability is being able to, y'know, walk to things.
Most of what I wrote here, you could apply in some form to nearly every US city.
> Most of what I wrote here, you could apply in some form to nearly every US city.
Also every Canadian city, with some very rare exception to the bus lanes bit (there are like... two in Toronto).
> Those very low density areas also generally have no commercial/retail activity allowed, which particularly hurts walkability: part of walkability is being able to, y'know, walk to things.
The other things are more a matter of preference, while I think zoning insanity is the clear leader in making North America's cities and towns tend to be so tedious and isolating.
> Very few physically protected bike lanes, in spite of its reputation as a bike-friendly city. The sum total value of bike improvements prior to the Orange Line was I believe estimated at around 60m, which is probably like a hundredth of one percent of the value of the roads and other stuff built for cars.
For all the investments of Dutch urban centres in bicycle infrastructure, it seems to me that it is the culture which makes or breaks this. As a more-than-commuter cyclist, I can say with confidence that a clumsy protected bicycle lane is more dangerous for cyclists (but quicker for motorists) than none at all. Most protected bicycle lanes are clumsy. Here in Hamilton (mid-tier city in Ontario), a lot of the roads are one-way (which has some benefits and drawbacks, the bus routes look funny), but on these one-way roads, the city of hamilton has installed protected two-way cycle paths. Now, these are convenient, to be sure, but you can imagine that when you get on a one way road, you do not expect oncoming traffic, this leads to all kinds of precarious situations, and (among other factors here) probably some deaths.
MAX is not that handicapped by being at grade because it has dedicated roads/lanes everywhere it goes. Portland will eventually ban cars downtown anyway (they are close).
Zoning laws are changing and have changed to allow infill. Plus, there is an urban growth boundary which will force higher density.
The bottlenecks in Portland are the bridges and there is at least one bridge that cars can't drive on, only busses and transit and there will be more in the future.
There are entire streets where vehicle through traffic has been blocked in favor of bicycles. There are still bike lanes on the major roads a block away too which is why you probably didn't notice the dedicated streets.
Portland is being upzoned all over the place. look at any major street west of 82nd and you will see new apartment buildings on almost every block. The suburbs of Portland haven't caught up, but in 20 years if trends continue in both places I could see Portland being more dense than San Francisco and the suburban sprawl not ending till the sierras.
Yes it is. It limits how long the train can be, because it can't block traffic downtown, which limits its capacity.
It also limits how fast it can travel. Having its own lanes is better than not, of course, but not as good as being completely physically separated. For an example of this that I'm particularly familiar with, a big part of Caltrain's unreliability comes from it having so many at-grade crossings.
> Zoning laws are changing and have changed to allow infill.
Yes, but very slowly. The current state is that they're extremely bad. Less extremely bad than the US average, probably, but still extremely bad nonetheless.
> There are entire streets where vehicle through traffic has been blocked in favor of bicycles.
Yes, and that's a good move. Would love to see more of those across the city. The way Portland has done it isn't as good as, say, Munich, but it's still a nice thing.
> There are still bike lanes on the major roads a block away too which is why you probably didn't notice the dedicated streets.
Eh, I mean the neighborhood greenways are good, don't get me wrong, but there should still be more off-street paths and physically protected lanes on arterials.
> look at any major street west of 82nd and you will see new apartment buildings on almost every block.
I'm aware of the steady upzoning in Portland, and that's good. It's still true that they're decades away from the kind of urbanism that many cities in, say, Western Europe take for granted as the norm, where "only single family home" areas do not really exist in major cities.
> MAX doesn't have the Caltrain problem because it is not at grade outside of downtown.
That still limits its speed for that area, and its capacity everywhere.
> You are comparing Portland to European cities which is not a fair comparison. Compared to any city in California, Portland is miles ahead.
Nah, transit usage is much higher in SF, and BART + Caltrain + Muni is better than Portland's system.
Anyway, like I said, Portland is one of the better US cities for urbanism, it's just that that's a bit like claiming to be a more honest-than-average politician.
That's interesting, and good, but it's hardly a substitute for dedicated lanes, let alone separated-grade lanes. A bus with signal priority can still get slowed down by and stuck in traffic when there are flat out too many cars around.
You greatly over-estimate how much those things influences people's decisions. People move for jobs. SF is pretty much the poster child for a terrible place to live (transit clusterfuck, aggressive homeless, high rents, no hope of owning property for most, increasing crime) that people keep moving to for the economic opportunity (good jobs).
> SF is pretty much the poster child for a terrible place to live
That depends on what you value.
* SF's transit, while indeed bad, is still superior to all but a handful of other US cities.
* Similarly, SF is top tier for walkability and bikeability.
* SF has more cultural and ethnic diversity than most cities, especially since it's the principal city of a metro with a ton of immigration.
* SF has a LOT of interesting stuff that goes on (partially as a result of the previous point). Concerts and walks and other cultural events.
* Also as a result of the diversity, SF's food scene is really excellent.
* I'm not personally much of a fan, but a lot of people actually like SF's weather.
* SF is very left wing, and a lot of people in tech like that. Not everyone, but a lot of people.
The things you listed as problems largely are real problems of course, but there's a reason so many techies still choose to live in SF even if they work in Mountain View, and that's something your theory here doesn't explain: why not live in the closer, somewhat cheaper, and less crime/homeless-filled South Bay?
Your list of problems just reveals your own preferences: you prefer the advantages of the suburbs to the advantages of the city. Nothing wrong with that, but not everyone shares your preferences.
Personally, I think SF is a great place to live. It has great weather, lots going on, decent public transportation, lots of tech, and more open mindedness about how people want to live their lives. Other than issues that are pretty much inherent to living in a city (less access to large grocery stores, inability to setup a workshop in my home) the only big complaints I can think of are the cost of living, aggressive homeless people, and how crazy the DMV is.
Define economic winner....you mean top line income and area GDP? These places are the most expensive places in the country to live, and quality of living is considerably lower. Incomes may be lower in many areas of the country, but when you consider you can pay $2k/mo on a 5,000 sq ft mortgage instead of renting a 900 sq ft apartment, I don't view these places as economically successful as many perceive them to be.
Yes, I mean by having lots of high-paying jobs. Speaking in the abstract, that means economic success. You're not wrong that high cost of living can often cancel much of that out at the individual level though.
> quality of living is considerably lower.
See my other nearby comment for why this is a "it depends" thing. A lot of people would consider living in Kansas City to have lower "quality of life" than NYC even if it's less crowded and it's much easier to afford a house.
Your comment itself illustrates the disconnect here: we have one side arguing that the other side is wrong in what they want, ala
"Why don't more techies want to come here?? This is ridiculous!"
"Well, because they want to live in places with X Y Z even if they're expensive and crowded."
"Well, they should care more about A B C instead (because I do)."
> "Well, they should care more about A B C instead (because I do)."
I'm guilty of this, but I think your formulation is a straw man. All I want to tell people is that they shouldn't reflexively rule out the middle of the country, because a lot of people really would be happier there. Not everybody, but some people.
And the way (some people on) the coasts talk about the Midwest and the South is as though they're a complete and total non-starter that's out of consideration entirely. "Yeah, New York's expensive, but what am I going to do? Live in Cleveland? Obviously I can't do that!"
I think that kind of talk convinces a lot of people who would be happier somewhere else that they shouldn't even bother looking into those places. And that's a tragedy of human flourishing.
Edit to respond to one comment below:
> I think you're dismissing people's issues too easily.
On the contrary, I think you're inordinately focused on your own particular (and somewhat eccentric) issues. Most Americans prefer car ownership. You might think they're wrong to prefer this. I do, too! But, "I don't want to live somewhere where I have to own a car" isn't a mainstream American opinion.
I grew up in Michigan and moved to greater NYC after grad school, and I want to push back a bit against the idea that nobody on the coasts even considers the middle of the country.
My spouse and I would love to move somewhere less expensive than NYC, but we just can't make it work. We're both in fairly specialized tech fields, and prioritize walkability, diversity, great schools and career growth opportunity. Outside of say Chicago, it's hard to come up with a place that checks those boxes.
It would be pointless to try to speak to your particular situation, but I think a lot of people who think they can't get this or that thing out of, say, Nashville or Minneapolis, or whatever, are wrong. I don't mean to say their opinion is wrong. Live wherever you want! I mean to say that they have objectively false impressions about quantifiable aspects of those cities.
> I think a lot of people who think they can't get this or that thing out of, say, Nashville or Minneapolis, or whatever, are wrong.
If a person values a thing, saying, "well [thing] exists in these other cities too, there's just a whole lot less of it there" is maybe not a super effective counterpoint.
Like, I realize that basically every major city in the US does have public transit...technically. But pointing out that out is not useful when for most of those cities, said transit is slow, unreliable, sparse, and infrequent.
I don't just want transit. I want good transit. I don't just want walkability in a few isolated neighborhoods. I want widespread walkability.
I don't think that is generally people's concern. What people in bigger cities would want from smaller cities are things that are significantly better to offset the lesser verity and upside. If you to a large degree still have to deal with commuting, the housing market, education and health care (or whatever) it doesn't really do that. If these cities want to be competitive they have be attractive in their own right, not relative to a bigger city.
I think you're dismissing people's issues too easily. I've lived in Alabama before, and heeellll no I wouldn't want to settle down there. This isn't the only problem I had with the area (I lived in several different parts), but it felt super, super hostile to not-driving. And I should know, I had to bike around a lot as a mormon missionary there. We didn't even bother checking transit, it was taken as a given that it would be too slow and sparse to be useful.
My wife is even harder on this line than I am. We live in Munich now, and the biggest reason she doesn't want to come back to the US is that she doesn't want to go back to driving everywhere, and there are only a few cities where a family can reasonably and easily get away without a car.
People prefer car ownership because car manufactures lobbied for laws that shaped most modern american cities around the car. However, New York is so dense that getting around without owning a car is the norm.
Car ownership is a multi thousand dollar expense, every year. Many people would be happier with that cash in their pocket.
Firstly, I recognize this is just one factor. I focused on it because it's one I'm highly familiar with, not because it's the end-all be-all. I've already pointed this out in multiple comments. We could also talk about educational opportunities or tolerance/discrimination, but those things either aren't as clear cut or would be more contentious to discuss.
Americans saying they prefer cars when you ask makes sense when you consider the other options are usually hilariously bad wherever they live, and where they've lived in the past, too. Give them an option where walking and biking and transit actually work, and suddenly many people find those options desirable. Just look at how many American tourists say they love the transit system in, say, Tokyo, when they visit. Americans mostly "love cars" because they've been given no other serious options.
Lastly, while many people may not think of it in explicit terms, they may nonetheless enjoy some of the knock-on effects of urbanism, like a city "feeling more lively".
In my experience, your fundamental assumption about what "techies" want is at least partially flawed. Not that no one in tech wants bike Lanes, public transit, and authentic South Indian cuisine. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of people who work at FAANG consider these things important in their life. But there is still a large portion that truly don't care for all that. They live in the bay because if they can find an illegal $800/mo Airbnb they will make a lot of money, if they lose their job there is another close by, and that is where their close friends are. If there were an equal paying, less congested alternative to these tech hives, they would take it. This is, of course, generated from anecdotal evidence.
Fundamentally, some people like true urbanism, and others just don't.
You are not wrong, but I'm not saying this is the sole factor in city attractiveness here. It's just one factor. Other things equal, I think it's easier to attract top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs.
I focused on it in my original comment mostly just because it's an area I'm particularly familiar with, and it's an area where the cities that are supposedly "desperate" are hardly doing anything at all. (Not that I blame the local governments for that, really, I realize the local residents mostly want their cities to stay that way)
> You are not wrong, but I'm not saying this is the sole factor in city attractiveness here. It's just one factor. Other things equal, I think it's easier to attract top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs.
I wonder if the real situation is that it's easier to attract young "top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs." That's also tends to be kind of talent that's willing to work way more than is really good for them. The suburban lifestyle is more suited for established families and older "top talent."
This means they are underpaid ( which I am pretty sure quite a few people in tech are ):
- LIC Queens high rises have 2/2 rentals that go for $17k/mo. ~ 1200sq feet. High floors. Ok views. Ok buildings.
- In Manhattan those are $22k-$30k/mo in newer buildings and $15-20k/mo in older hifg rises.
They aren't full of tech bros. They are full of finance and attorney bros. I have an acquaintance that lives in one. He is one of the portfolio managers for one of the hedge funds. He is a salary only manager. By the standards of NYC apartments qualification, it means his take home after taxes has to be at around 65k/mo as proven by his tax returns for last two years.
Of course, there are also suburbs of major metros. Lots of people commute into Manhattan from Westchester every day. And, traditionally, most of the tech jobs in "Boston" were actually out in fairly far-flung suburbs and many still are (with the notable exception exception of biotech in Cambridge and the satellite offices of SV firms).
But you're absolutely right that a lot of new college grads want to live in the city and maybe not even buy a car.
The majority of the established workers already own houses in the suburbs, exurban areas, and even NH. For many of them, a location that's actually in the city is a bug, not a feature.
I suppose I forgot to state my original point. Let's hold all else equal, and look at the labor pool divided into two categories, urbanism and ruralism. Suburbs lie on the ruralism side for this comparison. The labor pool is of course not evenly divided in terms of preference, say maybe 3/4 of protential Google employees prefer urbanism. If a given employee prefers urbanism, and lives in one of the cities mentioned above (NYC, Yay Area, Boston), their resulting employee satisfaction (what the company cares about in this scenario) is improved. However, if a given employee prefers ruralism, their resulting employee satisfaction is worsened. Vice versa for a more suburban, smaller city.
Of course there is some cost to not collocating employees. Google has decided new offices are worth this cost, and thus Google can decide to allocate building/location resources based on employee preference alone (let's assume the other factors are somehwat insignificant, which could be valid taking into account the high proportion of labor cost).
If every additional dollar spent on a given location buys the same amount of office space and equipment in both the urban and suburban areas, then it would make sense to divide the budget for offices according to the proportions of the labor pool preferences. Now of course, a dollar in SF buys a lot less office space than a dollar in Lexington, so that should be a accounted for in budgeting decisions, as well as overhead costs involved in opening a new location.
If we look at Google's actions under this framework, it doesn't make much sense for Google to devote as much of their office budget to highly urban areas as they do, unless the proportion of current and potential employees that prefer ruralism is very low. I would find that difficult to believe. Of course there are other factors to consider, but the trend is what I mean to highlight.
That being said, the true proportion would have to be discovered, and company culture may not allow people to express their true desires. This would apply to many tech giants.
* You also have to factor in that people with suburban preferences are going to be less likely to be willing to move. It's a less accessible demographic.
* The nature of "suburbs" is that they don't scale well. They're not meant to, suburbs are supposed to be the thing on the outside, not the thing everyone comes to. And while costs may be lower in some ways, they may be higher in others: like how Google has to run its own fleet of shuttles to go to Mountain View, because transit is inadequate. They don't do that in NYC.
* Google has a cultural preference for being environmentally friendly. Suburban style living and working is more energy intensive and less environmentally friendly than its urban counterpart.
* There's a large contingent of people that are united in their support for companies like Google to open an office in a more suburban city, somewhere, but I suspect that if you actually tried to pick a particular city, suddenly that support would fracture into a million pieces.
I have lived in West Michigan (Insanely Cheap), Kansas City (Kinda Cheap), and Seattle (Pretty Expensive).
Thing is, renting a 900 sq foot apartment in any reasonably urban area has gotten pretty expensive anywhere. It was about 1000-1500$ in KC when I left. It's about 1600-2200 in Seattle. My salary jump from KC to Seattle more than makes up for the difference in rent. Other things may be slightly more expensive, but I don't really notice.
Major difference is you can buy a house in Kansas City, but even that is starting to get expensive - at least in the areas that I would like to buy a house in. Even Grand Rapids, Michigan is having its own housing crisis. At least the salaries are already high in coastal towns. That said, I sometimes feel like I was saving up enough money to buy a house back in the midwest.
Ultimately affordable housing isn't a factor of price as such. There have always been very expensive parts of town. It is how abruptly the city ends. Once these smaller cities get expensive there it nowhere to go, the rest is suburb. 10 000 new people in NYC is almost a rounding error, while even 1000 people in a smaller city (with a small core) could be significant.
This is also what San Francisco suffers from. It goes from city to essentially suburb extremely quick. While cities like New York, Paris and Tokyo just go on and on. Of course we only talk about those examples because they have developed that way over decades.
>There have always been very expensive parts of town.
Historically, yes. But I'd argue that there are a lot of US cities that got pretty hollowed out by white flight and other factors to the degree that there were essentially no desirable parts of town. What's happened is that any number of those cities now have a revitalized urban core (however small) and living in that small core with the dozen or so restaurants you can walk to, maybe some small markets, new condos, etc. is pricey.
I've either worked in or spend a fair bit of time in a few of those places. The few dozen square blocks on gentrified core is pretty nice as a visitor but it's pretty small.
It appears that you assume more sq. ft. implies higher quality of life. Are you aware of any studies that indicate that's true? I would think that most New Yorkers would consider the traffic mess in a place like Dallas to be an indication of a lower quality of life. I believe there are studies that indicate this is true.
It's not easy to imagine what other people place value on. I like peace and quiet, so suburban living suits me. Others value nice restaurants, good weather, close skiing, professional sports, access to first class health care, good jobs, inexpensive housing, low crime, etc. How can we judge the desirability of different cities with such different styles?
It seems there is exactly one reliable way to make this assessment. Look at where people move to. The large cities with the most rapid growth are (from Forbes 2018 list[1]):
> It seems there is exactly one reliable way to make this assessment. Look at where people move to.
Not necessarily. Many cities strictly limit how much housing they have, such that there is a hard limit on the number of people who could feasibly live there. SF is a good example of this, since it's also small and geographically constrained. Saying "well, the net increase in people was small, so therefore it must be that not so many people want to live there" is not necessarily true if physically the city cannot accommodate many more people due to regulations.
Looking at where people move to is useful, yes, but high housing prices are themselves often a marker of desirability, particularly in supply-constrained markets.
People don't want 5000 sq ft anymore. I looked at suburban houses as an option and was thinking I hope I never have enough crap to fill this much space. I think I can comfortably fit my family of 4 in 1200 sq ft indefinitely and never own a car.
1200 sqft is plenty of room for a 4 person family.
I mostly grew up in the city, in a small apartment, but for a while we did live in the Midwest, in a big house. The only problem with apartment living was that we had too much furniture we didn’t need from when we lived in the Midwest.
Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. Once we had our kid, I couldn't wait to get out of our 850 sq ft. house. (which also had an 850 sq ft basement for laundry and storage)
I occassionally work from home, and I need a seperate office with a door to do that. Also, I just like having some space to get away from the rest of the family for a while.
Like you, it's what I'm used to from when I grew up, so that probably plays a big part in my preference.
> 1200 sqft is plenty of room for a 4 person family.
That's a projection of your subjective preference.
1200 sqft is not enough space for just me, that's my subjective preference. I currently occupy a home by myself with about ~2,500 sqft. I don't utilize all the space regularly. My bills would not go down by much if I reduced that space to, say, 1,500 sqft. Housing where I live is spectacularly affordable. I consider not having to live in a tiny, cramped space to be a quality of life benefit. I enjoy that my kitchen is the size of a small studio in San Francisco or NY, and it costs me perhaps $120 per month as a share of my mortgage.
I’m sure that people richer than me can’t imagine living the way I do. I’m trying to point out that if you’re in the upper middle or upper class, your standard of living isn’t applicable to everyone else. I’m trying to point out that there exist a large number of people who are ok with the living conditions you see as unacceptable, not prove that no one wants a big home.
The average American home was around 1500 feet 30-40 years ago and people raised families in them just fine. Instead of 4br 400sq ft each with en suite bathrooms, you had 120sq ft bedrooms for kids. It wasn't until the excesses of the mid 2000's that 3-4k sq ft homes became somewhat common, and outside the realm of mansions. Now the trend for home size is decreasing.
> People don't want 5000 sq ft anymore. I looked at suburban houses as an option and was thinking I hope I never have enough crap to fill this much space. I think I can comfortably fit my family of 4 in 1200 sq ft indefinitely and never own a car.
That's an incredibly broad overstatement. There are plenty of people, including "techies," who still want a suburban home with a car.
There's a lot of talk in this thread that assumes that tech workers all want to live a minimalist lifestyle in a dense urban area (or even worse: that they should want to live that way). That's frankly false. I assume what's really going on is that people are projecting their parochial preferences onto a large group that's much more diverse than they understand.
Yes, I'm generalizing but it's definitely a trend. The schools in my city used to fight for attendance and now they fight crowding and the PTA rates in 7 figures. Families are staying in the city more than ever.
I lived in other "cities" in the US: Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC.
Here’s why people who can end up electing to live in a place like NYC and here's why the NYC is the economic winner.
I pay $3400/mo for 2400 3bd 2bath two floor apartment with a private backyard ( mine ). If I had a car, I could have parked in in a back - I don't because I have 27 zip cars available within a five minute walk. I also have Maven, Cars2Go and Enterprise -- I have an account with Maven because it is free and I only need to pay for usage of cars.
My commute to work is ~35 minutes door to door - which includes walking and a subway. When the L goes down for two years, I will have J and M and my commute at most will increase by 45 minutes. It won't affect me as I will just adjust my hours to avoid the rush hour shitshow caused by the stupidity of MTA and NYC politicians. Employers of NYC know about it and based on my informal polling seem to be willing to accommodate those who would be affected. I have an unlimited monthly metrocard which gives me all the needed access for about $130.
I have 3 super markets within a 10 minute walk, 1 CVS/1 Wallgreens/1 Rite Aid. I rarely have to use Uber, but if I do, it takes ~4 minutes for me to get one where I live. If I needed a doctor or a dentist, there are dozens within 15 minute walk. There are walkin medical centers, including the ones that are open 24x7 within a 20 minute walk. If I needed a proper hospital with ER, it can be accessed in about ~15 min. And some of the best hospitals in the country are at most with crazy traffic over Williamsburg bridge or Queens Midtown tunnel are ~45 minutes away.
If I feel like getting the biggest variety of produce or proteins or wine for cooking or entertaining, I have access to all suppliers in Chinatown, Koreatown, farmers markets (Union Sq farmers market makes other farmers market look like a stale 2 week old french fry), butchers and Hunts Point Terminal ( in addition to ethnic grocery stores and ethnic markets). All of them are accessible by the subway. Most of them deliver. Same day. Well. not Huntspoint but that’s where I can get whole wild caught King Salmon for $9/lb -- the same price that a distributor that sells to a distributor that sells to the vendor who sells to your supermarket for $22/lb pays. Except that I get it 7 days earlier and $13/lb cheaper. You get the idea.
Depending on how much time I want to spend "commuting" (subway ~ 45min max ) I have somewhere between 3 ( walk of of the door ) to 20 ( ten minute on L, J/M (per train/per direction, not total) to 50 (fifteen minutes) to > 400 (35 minutes) coffee shops/bars/restaurants/lounges/nightclubs. This includes the best restaurants in the country that a person who does not live in NYC needs a 3 months in advance to get a reservation at -- I can stroll into them and get a table in an hour worst case scenario simply because I'm out enough which means I run into people who work in or own those restaurants socially. I’m doing it this weekend - wife’s birthday so we are hitting four hottest places in 4 days, three of which are “not reservable until some time in January”. I made calls yesterday -- happen to meet one of the chefs at a party, the other was sitting next to me in a little bistro where a photographer friend of mine works during the day ( he introduced us ) and two others are industry regulars so I know them from the other places they used to work at.
It also includes hole in a wall places that prove access to all kind of ethnic food ( I live in a PR/Dominican neighborhood which borders Polish/Eastern European and African-American neighborhood) really cheap - $20 would feed a family of 4 for at least 2 days. If for some reason I’m itching so socialize with 20 year olds, I can replace my Italian off the runway jacket that my wife picked up on her way home for $200 (it just has a cut on the inside label to in...
Married people with 3 kids and suburban preferences mostly do not want to move to begin with. That's why targeting this demographic is usually going to be less effective if you're trying to concentrate a large number of workers in one area.
Ooh, that's a good choice. Philly isn't more conservative, but it is cheaper and I'm given to understand it's one of the more urbanist cities in the US (probably because of its age). I'm sure I can still find some things, though.
* Very few miles of protected bike lanes, although at least things are looking up there for the future: https://bicyclecoalition.org/our-campaigns/30-miles-of-prote... (although the fact that 30 miles is celebrated as some big achievement is itself telling)
* Two subway lines is better than most US cities, but still not very many for a metro of this size. Munich has a comparable metro population and has 8 subway lines, for example, not to mention several separated-grade commuter/rapid transit lines that go way out into the burbs. Looks like high quality, rapid transit is still close by for only a small percentage of Philadelphians. It also sounds like the regional rail system is in disrepair.
* Looking at the zoning map, it looks like implementation of mixed use zoning is much better than most US cities, but still very limited in many neighborhoods, which limits walkability: https://openmaps.phila.gov/
* Also from the zoning map, many areas are still zoned just for single-family homes, which limits walkability/bikeability (and also encourages economic segregation, to boot).
Philly's level of urbanism should really be like the bare minimum for US cities, but in reality it's close to the top, I think.
I just moved back to Philadelphia. After stints in Boston, New York, and Seattle. I have a completely different perspective than when I first left.
A lot of the homes are single family, or row homes. This results in swaths of a residential feel in a city. Even the hot Fishtown felt very rural to me after my stint in New York. Although I appreciate the quite. Looking at the history Philadelphia started with the idea of brownstones/row homes instead of apartment buildings. To give people more space. But this does result in sparseness of shops. A lot of the multi tenant buildings are either new constructions or converted warehouses.
The two subways is always a point of contention. But I don't find it that big of a deal. Living near either Broad or MFL, I can get around very easily. The city is also extremely walk able, a majority of the people I knew just walk. It's under two miles river to river. If not that there are a number of buses.
http://skookul.com/ <| For real time public transit.
I can't speak regional rail. But when I left ~15, commuting from Delaware was a shit show.
In the city bike lanes I don't think is the best. But the river trail along the west side is well used. I know a number of people up in outer Manayunk bike in.
https://schuylkillrivertrail.com/
Having just taken a history walking tour. How the city feels makes alot of sense. It's meant to feel like a number of connected neighborhoods. I still think it deserves a second look for tech companies. With all the universities and good start to transit. It's ripe for an investment outside of Comcast.
Yeah, gotta admit here, Philly has done a good job. The public transit is good. I live an hour outside Philly, and taking the train in is a real option here because the trains are good and getting around once in city has never been an issue. Couple that with easy access to NYC itself, and it's even nicer. It's not perfect, but then neither is NYC.
JW, do you use a lot of other public trans? It's easy to be impacted by an issue and think that SEPTA is incompetent, forgetting that public transit is hard and not realizing how bad other people are doing. After all, Septa isn't famous for catching on fire all the time[0][1].
* Almost no rail transit whatsoever, closest equivalent looks like a bus system that doesn't even have its own lanes, let alone being separated-grade.
* I see a few off-street bike paths, but at a glance, no physically protected bike lanes. Maybe there are a few I'm missing, but if so, very few. Very few bike lanes in total, too.
* Freeways cutting through the city
* City is super sprawled out, looks like most of the space is the typical American mandatory single-family home area with no retail activity, so walkability is limited even where the sidewalks are fine.
* Very wide roads all over the place
Also just in general Detroit seems like it's been historically mismanaged and has lots of problems with crime and infrastructure and corruption and poor schools, which doesn't help things.
To be sure, an actually thorough analysis would require firsthand experience (and I have visited Portland at least multiple times). It's just that most US cities are so very terrible at urbanism that it's easy to spot many of the massive flaws from Google Maps.
Most Midwestern cities are indeed sprawling, pedestrian-hostile, car-philic wastelands and that's what you're going to see on Google Maps. But, thankfully, they didn't destroy all of their pre-war housing and infrastructure and so most of them have at least a couple interesting, walkable neighborhoods. If you're moving to NYC, then you can throw a dart at the map and you'll land in a walkable neighborhood. If you're moving to St. Louis or Cincinnati, then you'll need to do some research. The dart is a bad strategy.
So, look, it's totally fair to say, "I don't want to live in a city like that." But there are people working really hard to make their little pockets better for bikes and pedestrians and so on, and I think people underestimate the extent to which that's going on and the extent to which they could be happy in a neighborhood like that, especially when housing is 1/10th the cost.
> But, thankfully, they didn't destroy all of their pre-war housing and infrastructure and so most of them have at least a couple interesting, walkable neighborhoods.
Sure, but how useful is that, really? Huntsville has a New Urbanist neighborhood that looks nice and cute, but the rest of Huntsville (which I have lived in before) fucking sucks for anything that's not a car. As soon as you need to go anywhere else, you gotta go back into driving, and only driving.
> If you're moving to St. Louis or Cincinnati, then you'll need to do some research. The dart is a bad strategy.
I don't dispute that you can mitigate the effects somewhat via careful selection. But:
* That only works for those particular neighborhoods. You're probably not gonna always stay in those, so you're still going to need to at least own a car, and probably make at least somewhat frequent use of it if you want to go to other places in the area.
* You're probably also looking at other things you want in a neighborhood: crime rate, school quality, restaurants, other points of interest, etc. Having to only look at a few neighborhoods as viable urbanist-friendly locations greatly constrains your options when it comes time to look at the other dimensions.
> I think people underestimate the extent to which that's going on
Maybe other people do, but I'm a dorky-ass urbanism nerd who reads blogs on this shit all the time, so I don't. I'm well aware of what's going on. But I also travel enough to know that these cities are so woefully behind most of the rest of the developed world, it would take literal CENTURIES to catch up at the current snail's pace of improvement. Changes that happen after I'm dead are of no use to me.
I live outside of Detroit. All your points and criticisms are valid. When I visit the coasts, I often tell people who ask that it was nice to spend some time in a "real" city. The true "big city" core of Detroit is quite small, and whenever I'm in Chicago or even Cleveland I'm reminded of that fact.
That said, the experience in the downtown/midtown core of Detroit has improved drastically since the bankruptcy. It feels incredibly vibrant. When I started working there in 2012, the city felt completely empty after about 5:30. Today, downtown is buzzing seemingly all night.
Even if you live within walking distance of your office, though, you still need a car to get groceries though, and as much as it sucks, I don't see how that changes anytime soon (or within my lifetime).
> How many of those more conservative/cheaper US cities actually take walking/biking/transit over driving as a serious issue?
Do you really think NYC is a good example of this? I found the car traffic horrific, cycling is variable at best and downright dangerous at worst. The subway is pretty amazing but massively under-invested.
Even most UK cities which have longer levels of history restricting what can be done for cyclists are better than NYC.
NYC certainly isn't perfect, but there's been significant investment in bike infrastructure (and the expansion of citibike) and is quickly improving. Anecdotally, I find I have to plan my trips a little bit, but can get from my apartment in Queens to most places in Manhattan without leaving a protected bike lane for more than 2-3 blocks
So, I just got back from a week-long vacation to NYC, and it's reinforced what I've always felt about it: NYC is a wonderful place to visit, but I'd never want to live there.
I had a lot of fun, and I wish I could've stayed another week, but actually living and working there? No thank you. I actively do not want to fight through crowds and run to catch connecting trains just to get to and from work every day. I don't want to live in a tiny apartment with no cooling but a room air conditioner sticking out the window. I don't want to be surrounded by noise 24/7.
Trust me, for every person who wants to live in NYC because it's actually a city, there's at least one person like me who only wants to set foot in cities to play tourist and would rather live and work in the suburbs.
And I'd rather live in modern suburbs at that... in NYC suburbs like Westchester (where I stayed during my trip), the housing stock is so old that even a nice place will be a fixer-upper, and the street layout is horrendously bad because nothing was planned in advance. I strongly prefer living in southwestern suburbs where nothing is older than the late '70s, half the neighborhoods were built in the 21st century, and the suburbs are built around a one-mile grid of six-lane divided highways (e.g. Dallas, Vegas, Phoenix).
The great thing about NYC (and a thing that is lost on most people visiting the city, including myself before I moved here), is how many options you have for your living situation.
Want the crowds, the city life and the noise? Live downtown. Old-school New York? The upper west side. Brownstones on quiet, beautiful streets? Any number of Brooklyn neighborhoods. A quaint New England-y fishing village? City Island. Conservative-leaning, leafy suburbs? Staten Island. The ethnic enclave of your choice? Peppered throughout the city. Cheapo cool kid artist communities? Bushwick/Ridgewood. Want to own a boat and live on the water? The Rockaways. The list goes on and on, and that's not even touching Jersey, Westchester or Long Island.
The beauty of the city is that all of these places are unquestionably, culturally 'New York'. They're also, for the most part, quite well connected to the city core on affordable public transit, and in many cases quite affordable by big American city standards.
NYC literally has an app where anyone can press a button if they're standing somewhere where they feel like a tree should be planted, and if you press the button a couple hours later a group of guys will show up and start digging a hole and plant the tree. For all of its problems, it's the only city that works at least somewhat like a city should.
That's kind of a twee, brooklyn-artisinal-pickle example, but the greater point is true: having lived in a number of big cities around the US (including San Francisco), New York is simply functional in a unique way for a US city. Even San Francisco is a backwater by comparison.
For example: I was issued a ticket in SF for moving (and I hired professionals to do it). That kind of crap simply doesn't happen in New York, but it happened routinely in SF.
> That's kind of a twee, brooklyn-artisinal-pickle example
I'd actually argue that the quality of street / park trees is the best way to judge how competently a city has been run over time. When a city has lots of healthy older trees, that means not a single administration has dropped the ball in over 200 years or whatever. If look around NYC there are thousands of mature American elm trees everywhere, but not in any of the surrounding suburbs. Why? Because NYC parks department actually takes care of the trees when they're sick and removes them if they can't be saved, whereas all of the surrounding tri-state towns just let them infect the surrounding trees and then die.
Now maybe the fact that Robert Moses's favorite tree was the sycamore should have been a hint to everyone that some of his other policies may have been suspect, but that's a different issue.
> How many of those more conservative/cheaper US cities actually take walking/biking/transit over driving as a serious issue?
I often wonder about why relatively conservative /cheap/low-density/car-bound are so correlated.
Are there
significant counter-examples, in the US or elsewhere, where, for example, a more conservative area is higher density or urban, compared to it's more progressive surroundings?
If those situations are very rare, then why? Is it strictly historical, or does relatively higher density, and more frequent interactions that result, change many people's perceptions.
> One of the big reasons a lot of people really like NYC is that it's one of the few cities in the US that actually feels like a city.
I think you’re conflating current cultural preference with actual economic ability. Where do towns like Palo Alto, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale fit into this?
This has been the case in the UK since, well, forever.
In every field I can think of, London has the top tier jobs.
It surprises me that the US was ever different. I'm wondering whether it's a young country effect.
I don't think it's "Elysium" as claimed. It's more like - if you're competitive and want to be the best in a field, you're probably (not always) going to move to London.
If you want to live a life, raise a family, buy a house, etc, the status game isn't that relevant, and you don't need to bother with it.
It's the same on a global scale too - if you're playing that game, there's a hierarchy of 'best paying, most status-giving' _countries_. The most keen will move across the world.
You’re comparing the UK to the whole US when you should compare it to California or the Northeast. A better comparison would be Europe but I think London and SF would still be the best paying.
I have a lot of friends and old co workers I Europe. My Serbian coworker had no problem moving to Spain and learning Spanish. My Greek friend had no problem living in the Netherlands. Another Slovakian friend has no problem living in Scotland, same goes for a couple Germans I know in Scotland.
The Poles have no problem moving everywhere in Europe working construction jobs.
Hell the Russians have no problem spending summers working in the part of Florida I vacation at.
Moving from Serbia to Spain is obviously not equivalent to moving between US states. Come on. It's more like Scotland to England with a bit more distance involved.
Look at the bright side, just 10-20 years ago it was basically just the SF Bay Area with tiny outposts in Seattle, Boston and Austin. Now all three of those are a lot bigger. NYC now has a solid tech scene. Boulder has one. Toronto is starting to develop one. Many secondary cities are starting to develop their own like in Durham, NC. Pittsburg is now on the map when previously all CM alums would leave the area after graduation. Even Detroit is developing a small scene.
Tech opportunities are still going to cities, especially those with the biggest companies, but it's spreading to more and more cities and tech companies now know they need to expand to other markets to reach new talent.
Google and Amazon are not “real industry”. I don’t even consider them to be “tech”, though that is my opinion being a traditional EE hardware designer.
I've relocated to NYC area for work, from a different country. One can get depressed about jobs not being where they are, or go to where the opportunity is better. People have freedom of movement and there is incredible infrastructure supporting that. Why not take advantage instead of complaining?
I think overall the US would have a better quality of life if industry was not so concentrated in major cities. Fewer people would need to make trade-offs between their jobs and lifestyle.
I live in Manhattan and work in Midtown. I love it here, but I'll give you my complaints (for whatever they're worth):
1. The traffic and noise in Midtown is downright oppressive. People just laying on their horns for basically no reason, giant trucks speeding by the mass of pedestrians.
2. Yes, too many people. This is also Midtown specific. I don't mind crowds and I like a busy streetscape, but Midtown reaches a level that's dystopian. I dread walking on the avenues during rush hour. People spill out into the street, because there's not enough sidewalk to contain them all and it's basically impossible not to bump into people the entire way. I'm a fast walker. I hate walking slow. Midtown is very frustrating in a very minute-to-minute kind of way. (See #1 for some ideas about how we could give people more space. Hint: less space for cars.)
3. I would like to own my own home. I don't see how that's going to be practical here.
4. I like building stuff. In my hometown I had lots of tools and the space to work on projects. I don't have the space for any of that here.
5. I'm a cyclist. I prefer to own a couple bikes. I can't do that here. I barely have room for one bike in my 350 sq/ft apartment. It's kind of a pain even having that one bike.
Any one of these could be reason enough to prefer a less crowded and expensive city.
All of that sounds familiar, yeah. I’m in the same situation as you. I’m cautiously optimistic about buying an apartment in Manhattan, however (though Amazon moving half of HQ2 here won’t do me any favors on real estate prices).
With regard to #1: I’m somewhat hopeful that the new state senate shakeup will get Cuomo’s congestion pricing ideas implemented. Not sure if that will ultimately be good or bad, but it might alleviate traffic.
I currently live in Denver and spend almost every weekend in the mountains. To me, the depressing part of NYC is the complete lack of fresh air, outdoor activities, and solitude.
I’ve never been to Denver, but I’ve been to Oregon and your comment reminds me of the beautiful hiking and scenery available there. I can definitely sympathize with that. My partner and I typically flee to a nice area upstate for a weekend every so often so we can enjoy nature more.
Central Park is more like a big outdoor garden not in anyway comparable to a large trail system or public lands area. There are trails a little north and in nearby Jersey 1-2 hours by car on the way to (if you head out in the early morning). But on the way back... God have mercy. Expect at least two hours and closer to three and a half in crawling traffic as soon as you get somewhere close to the city.
You can see quite a bit more like the Adirondacks you're willing to drive 5-6 hours, but a drive like that isn't suitable for a day hike.
You can also find some smaller trails and untended areas on the outskirts of the city (eg, Marine Park in southeast Brooklyn). But these tend to be.. well small.
Anyway my point is, like most big cities, it's difficult to really get "outdoors" with any measure of convenience.
There are absolutely massive parks in staten island and to some extent the bronx too. People forget simply how big NYC actually is, where should you look beyond just the city there's a tons of different types of nature than what Denver has (beaches and water for one, a more significant fall, ect).
As someone who has lived there and likes visiting, there's a lot to hate about NYC.
It's expensive. The fact that it's sometimes held out as being reasonable compared to the Bay Area says more about the Bay Area than NYC.
You can't conveniently/inexpensively own a car. Which is an advantage for some. Not so much for others who like hopping in the car to run a quick errand.
The crush of people all the time.
It's "gritty." Not 1980s gritty any longer but still. (Smell, noise, homelessness (not SF levels but that's an awfully low bar).
Basically, it's an urban landscape on steroids even compared to, say, London. That's not necessarily bad but a few days of it is about my limit.
The moral of Elysium wasn’t that our species is headed for that world. The director intended it to be a dramatic portrayal of the world we already live in. Take away the scifi backdrop of a generational satellite with artificial gravity and immortality and you’re left with substantially the same vision of the world as what we currently have.
Those of us who are affluent and live in coastal cities (and similar cities across the world) are, comparatively speaking, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Most of us can’t afford everything around us. But we enjoy - and frequently take for granted - luxuries and technology which billions of other humans can scarcely even conceive of having in everyday life.
>
This coupled with the Amazon news is starting to get distressing. With the amount of companies that copycat them it’s like the rich are getting richer and the economic benefits are still going to be concentrated only in the most affluent cities. The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them but it appears nobody can come up with a business plan.
Why would godless, latte-sipping, well educated, coastal executives--some of whom weren't even born in this country--want to open up offices in places that have made it abundantly clear they hate people exactly like that?
They want an educacted workforce, and the brain drain of people out of rural areas only accelerates that. Towns with good colleges are doing better than those without. The elitism comes mainly from economic rather than social considerations Ive been seeing. See: Texas.
As somebody who lives in Dallas, I'm actually glad that Amazon is passing us up in favor of NoVa, and I've heard similar sentiments from talking to a few of my fellow Dallasites.
The consensus is that if Amazon moved here, all they'd accomplish is sending housing prices into the stratosphere and turning traffic into a nightmare. We have plenty of jobs here, and housing prices and traffic are already starting to get problematic. We don't need Amazon throwing gasoline on the fire.
I've also heard discussion about how we don't want Amazon because they could wreck the city's culture like they did to Seattle... and from what I've seen, both the right and the left are pretty unified on this. We like Dallas the way it is, thank you very much.
> The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them but it appears nobody can come up with a business plan.
Got to tell you: few smart people want to live in some anti-civil-rights nightmare where everyone is anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and hopelessly religious. To top it off those states are full of rampant anti-labour provisions: no anti-poaching, no anti-non-compete.
Sorry, the Rust Belt made itself suck. This isn't disturbing. This is righteous.
> some anti-civil-rights nightmare where everyone is anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and hopelessly religious.
The fact that you write things like this indicates that you are not truly the type of "smart person" that you obviously consider yourself. The real world is not the caricature that you see from your echo chamber.
And forget even applying if you've ever had a negative relationship with a coworker who now works for Google…you'll get greylisted and ghosted midway during the interview process.
Ouch, does this really happen?? I feel like Google's hiring process makes it very difficult for someone with a personal animus to train-wreck the whole hiring process.
A manager who fired me from a previous job before he was at Google (well, he now disputes that I was fired, just that my role was eliminated) bragged to a now–fellow Googler that he had blocked me from getting a role at Google NYC twice now, not knowing the Googler's prior friendship with me.
I don't know what the precise internal process is but have been told by multiple former coworkers, now at Google, that any time I've applied for a role and gotten they've been asked to comment on their experience with me at whatever previous roles we overlapped in.
I eventually asked Google recruiting to put me on a do not contact list after going through the process multiple times.
It definitely seems plausible and matches my (very limited) experience with a few friends that have joined Google, but I was wondering if you have any links.
I guess you would have to accept joining with a lower salary, and then try to switch to another FANG company to get a fair salary?
Well, there's me. I passed their interview gauntlet, but their initial offer was well under what I currently make, and their second barely matched it. They also badly down-leveled me (which is partially my fault for not insisting on an L5 interview loop).
From my direct experience, and talking to other people who have negotiated with Google, the only ways to get a good offer out of them is to either come from a FAANG or get a competing offer from one.
in SV, got an L5 offer couple years back, barely matching my relatively low for SV total with the base lower. They pretty much refused to negotiate. The same experience as couple acquaintances - one even took such an offer and not surprisingly ran away a year later. On the other hand - some other acquaintances make $400K-$500K as L5/L6 there.
> one even took such an offer and not surprisingly ran away a year later
I thought about that, but I'd rather not put myself through the job change gauntlet so often, and the role was such a step down in responsibility that I would be better off with a year in my current role.
It's typical for fintech programmers at top-tier firms. Not typical across SWE jobs in general in NYC, of course.
The thing about fintech though is they get worked really hard. It's very much a "You eat what you kill" mentality. On an hourly basis you might be better off "only" making $300K at a FAANG and working normal 40 hour work-weeks.
It's exciting. Google has been talking about expanding its presence forever. At least since purchasing the Chelsea Market complex. The Youtube studio is an amazing space. As is the AWS Loft downtown. Cornell Tech will have a new campus on Roosevelt Island. And Brooklyn has its New Lab / Navy Yards that is almost a tech city unto itself. It feels like there's community. And a multitude of events every day and night. With rents stabilizing, and burgeoning FinTech and AI momentum, I just think everyone at some point in their lives should consider a stint in the city ;)
The nice thing about NYC in comparison to the Bay Area is that we're not afraid of building more housing here, so supply increases every year and has a dampening effect on rent increases. Also, mass transit is much better, so if you live even 30 minutes away on a subway line the rents will be much lower. If you're willing to commute an hour each way (which is still less than a lot of people who drive every day on I-101 put up with) then rents are a fraction of what they are in nice areas of Manhattan, or the Bay Area for that matter.
Though personally I don't like relying on the subway (which increasingly has problems these days), hence I live in biking distance.
Is that really true? I don't know if this data is accurate but googling "average rent new york city" vs "average rent san francisco" brings up these 2 results as the first hits. They look almost identical. The site claims average rent for NYC is $3634 vs SF at $3735. It also claims prices increased in NYC by 9.46% over last year vs SF at 0.62%
If NYC is currently at $3634 then yes, NYC has done much better than SF.
I remember getting out of college in 2005, hearing about the $3000+ 1BR apartments in NYC, and thinking "Why the hell would anyone want to move to NYC?" (I was living with my parents in Boston at the time, but looked at moving out and would've paid $650 with roommates or about $1100 for a 1BR in that city.) My now-wife was living in SF that same year and paid $1200 in rent.
The huge increases in SF rent happened mostly from 2010-2015. I paid $1400/month for a 1BR in 2009-2010 (Mountain View, not SF, but SF was still < $2000 at the time). By 2014 it was basically impossible to find something < $3000 in any transit-accessible part of the city, and apparently it's leveled off since.
I'm a tech worker in NYC and none of my firends (except one idiot) pays more than 2500 for their studio apartment within Manhattan. I share a super fancy apartment in a hirise in Brooklyn and pay less than 2K. If you're okay living in Queens you can get a 2BR with less than 1h commute. And this is not even talking about distant Brooklyn, Bronx or jersey (also less tax)
It seemed quietly beautiful to me. Very nice scenery and otherwise typically suburban? The local hispanic population is large; I walked up into the hills once and found an impressive park, filled with people none of whom were speaking English.
None of the tech jobs are in San Francisco. Unlike most cities, people live in SF/Oakland and commute to the suburbs in Mountain View and Palo Alto to work, and that commute is closer to two hours door to door.
Is it possible to do this without a car, though? Because in NYC you don't need a car even to live an hour away on transit, and a car is a pretty substantial monthly expense.
I'm not just referring to the commute though, I mean is the neighborhood you're living in itself built around not requiring a car? I live in a dense part of Manhattan where the majority of people don't own vehicles and most needs can be fulfilled simply by walking a few blocks; is this true of South Hayward?
If you count the opportunity cost of the time, stress, and money you spend using NJTransit to commute into Manhattan, and especially if you’re commuting further into other boroughs, the tax savings of NJ turn into losses.
100% Agree. It's very easy to underestimate the additional pain of commuting from NJ (unless you are talking about Jersey City or Hoboken), especially if you own a home and are paying NJ property taxes.
Lots of people live in Jersey City and take the PATH, which is a faster, cheaper, and more reliable commute than NJT. They still avoid NYC city tax and get cheaper and nicer apartments though.
There's other ways into NYC from NJ that aren't the train. There are many ferry options along the hudson, and nothern shore area has a commuter ferry that is 40 minutes to Wall St.
I live in NJ, and from 2006-2010 worked in WFC near Wall Street...While the ferry option is nice and pleasant, it used to cost about 2.5~3 times MORE expensive than the PATH train (the "subway' that connects both sides of the Hudson). Also, the duration of the commute gets cut down only about 1.5~2 minutes (as compared to when the PATH is running without delays). Overall, not really sustainable - neither in time nor money. Though, as a tourist, yeah, the ferry is nice for its views of the skyline. ;-)
I've used the ferry a handful of times to take my bike in, but it definitely caters to a very specific clientele. It's simply not worth it unless you live right there or work right where it lets off.
New York City is huge though. To live in a place that isn’t NYC while still in state means Yonkers or White Plains. Reasonable commute is like an hour, maybe more.
Eh, you can get to dense suburbia in about 45 minutes, sparse suburbia in like 1 hour, and if you're willing to commute 90 minutes, maybe two hours, you're out in what city slickers would call "rural".
Also don't forget Long Island, the Other In State.
(I'm one of the idiots who commutes ~2 hours from near Poughkeepsie, which is (a) still on commuter rail [the super-express Hudson line train takes ~90 minutes, plus the time to get to & from it] and (b) where half of the food you find in NYC farmer's markets comes from. I kinda like it.)
You're definitely not living in the city and it's certainly not for everyone.
For me, I didn't really take advantage of the city - I like occasionally went to a museum or went out to eat but I mostly just sat on the couch watching TV and surfing the internet. So I moved north and got myself forty acres of tree-covered Bath-Nassau soil with rocky outcroppings. Now my free time is filled with rennovating a 200 year old vernacular house, turning my land into a proper hobby farm, and going to various kitschy festivals and hiking trails with my family. My commute is, frankly, the most relaxing part of my week, where I can sit quietly for 90 minutes and read a book or take a nap or post WoT conspiracy theories on Reddit.
It may not be for everyone, but it's amazing to me that I can have this lifestyle while also commuting to a regular old desk job in the largest city in the country. (It's also amazing to me that I'm part of a multi-century tradition of both commuting to the city from rural upstate and of gentleman farmers coming upstate from the city.)
I tried commuting from Poughkeepsie (well, that odd stop one stop south) during the dotcom 90s and it nearly killed me. The train was fine, but that final 30 minutes on the subway downtown just pushed it over the edge. Gave up after six months. If you can manage it and keep to sane working hours (I was working 9:30 a.m. - 9:00 p.m. routinely) keep doing it.
Yeah, I mostly agree; I did Metro North for a couple of years before switching to Amtrak. It's less flexible and a little more expensive than Metro North, but the train is usually faster and it drops you off by Penn Station which is a pleasant walk to the Google office (and like 5 minutes by subway if you don't feel like a pleasant walk).
My personal limit is 12-13 hours out of the house each day; more than that and it burns me out fast.
It definitely wouldn't work for me with an employer who was less flexible about when the work day starts or who had expectations of large numbers of hours spent with butt in chair.
Do you have any data to support this? I am not being argumentative, I just found that from personal experience the opposite was true- that total rent tended to be higher in SF, but the apartments tended to be larger, at least than those in Manhattan. It seemed to me that SF was slightly cheaper per sq ft, with many more houses having access to outdoor space.
The closest I could find in terms of data was this site- https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/us-average-apart... which compares SF to all of NYC, not Manhattan. The studios are somewhat bigger, the 1BRs slightly smaller, and the 2BRs are on average slightly larger- but the difference is very small.
I'm going just by the bedroom counts listed on that website. It's possible that those numbers are also deceptive because square footage per bedroom is sufficiently different. I was mainly remarking that the breakdown seems to indicate that NY inventory is biased towards 2BR apartments while SF inventory is biased towards 1BR. This is based merely on the fact that the SF overall average is much closer to the SF 1BR average while the NY overall average is much closer to the NY 2BR average.
Price per square foot would shed more light on this, but I don't know of a reliable (free) source of that data.
Both NYC and SF are rent controlled areas. Rent control is cancer that punishes younger and newer inhabitants while making rent cheap for the rich. In fact, NYC has more vacant apartments than homeless people.
Those stats about NYC are, quite frankly, incorrect. I have no idea where they got that garbage data from, but it's garbage. Housing stock was massively added to over the past year and the market has actually gotten friendlier to renters, with many buildings offering one month free rent to entice renters.
The burbs are wsy better too. You can still find a great family home in a good school district within a reasonable commute on NJ transit, lirr, or metro north, well under a million.
I feel like the suburbs in NJ within reasonable commuting distance (door to door in 45 min max reliably) offer all the drawbacks of the city with none of the benefits of the suburb. You get a little more space, but not enough. A little less traffic, but still a lot of traffic. No decent gyms or parks, unless you like paying out the nose. And super high and ever increasing taxes. And I think even a 45 min door to door commute is too much, but add on the system’s unreliable-ness, I would find it unacceptable to commute from Jersey.
I don’t know much about NJ. I lived in Westchester and it was great. Not sprawling exurbs by any means, but that’s a good thing. You can live in Rye or Pehlam and walk or bike to the Metro North station. MNR is very reliable, runs frequently at rush hour, and will get you downtown in 30-40 flat.
Yes, NJ Transit has to borrow Amtrak's tunnel and it frequently has problems, as does NJ Transit's stuff. MTA/NY infrastructure is much better, but still, I don't see how one can get from Rye or Pehlam to downtown in 40 min.
So door to door, you're still looking at 70 min to 90 min commute one way, with the added stress of possibly dealing with train delays. I wouldn't be able to do that more than a couple years.
There's a lot of hyperbole in here, especially about parks and gyms. There's plenty of parks all over NJ that offer different options from hiking, biking, to kayaking. Gyms are a plenty and it's weird to even say you'd pay more for them when places like Equinox or Chelsea Piers are absurd in price. And go ask any person commuting from Brooklyn right now how there commutes are going to get into Midtown Manhattan, they can be 30-45 minutes with current state of the MTA.
I know there are, but then the door to door commute is unacceptable per my standards. And the further from NY Penn Station you are, the more variance you are subject to, making commutes even longer.
My point is, if you want a door to door commute of sub 45 min, consistently, then you would need to be in Hoboken/Jersey City/Secaucus/Weehawken/etc. That whole Hudson County corridor doesn't offer much in the way of decent gyms (swimming pools, racquetball/squash courts, basketball, etc), and neither does it have any decent hiking. People don't really have yards there either.
If you move out of that circle, you do start getting some amenities, but your commute starts looking like 45 to 60+min, and you have to park your car at the train station or get dropped off, etc. It's all personal preference, but for me, I would want all the benefits of owning a car, or all the benefits of not needing to own a car. Living in NJ and working in NYC seems like compromising on both.
I'm not familiar with DC, but SF is just as bad if not worse. My original goal was to point out that commuting from NJ isn't a reasonable commute, in my opinion.
I actually just came back from a week-long trip to NYC where I stayed with my cousin in Harrison (Westchester) and took Metro-North into and out of the city every day I was there. I had a lot of fun, but I would never ever want to actually commute like that day in and day out.
The train ride from Harrison to Grand Central alone is somewhere around 45 minutes. And unless you work right at Grand Central, you're looking at rushing to make connecting trains. Doing this for a week while exploring the city was fine, but the idea of having to do this every single day until I retire just to make a living would make me want to blow my brains out.
I don't know how my cousin does it. She works in the financial district and takes a 6am train into the city every day. When she gets home, she has just enough time to put her kids to bed before passing out. Now I understand why her husband has a WFH job.
And about that "great family home" thing... the housing stock is so old that every house, even the nice ones, is going to be a fixer-upper. Not long before I got there, they had a plumbing joint break in one of the upstairs bathrooms. Within a few minutes, it wrecked the fixtures in that bathroom, obliterated the ceiling of the kitchen it was above, and did a number on the kitchen counters.
I'm also generally not a fan of how the suburbs are laid out either. Houses are spaced so far apart that it feels like you're living in the country even though you're close to the city (I went trick-or-treating with their kids, and I had to force myself to not brag that my hauls when I was their age were twice as big as theirs because I got to visit twice as many houses in the same amount of time :), and the street layout is twisty nonsense where even the major roads only have two lanes.
No thank you.
I'll gladly visit NYC again (and I'm sad my trip was only one week and not two), but I never want to live there. I'm happy living in Dallas, though I'm considering a move to Las Vegas for political reasons. Either way, both of those are polar opposites of the NYC suburbs.
Agreed, being high income and living in Manhattan or nice parts of Brooklyn is great, but other than that, I find the quality of life to be much better in many other cities.
my point was....how much will they "pull in" for the thirty+ years of their retirement?
public employees also don't have to worry about obsessively sharpening their skills every four years or foreign labor or being made irrelevant by cloud services, and they don't care about recessions for the most part
techie Ragnarok is coming within ten years, HN will turn into a giant therapy board
Very, very few retired CHP are getting $200k/year. The average CHP pension is <$100k/year and is worth $2.6 million. Only about 1000 retired CHP are getting more than $100k/year.
The average Googler should be making 300-400k+/yr after 5 years. If that Googler is willing to live on a CHP salary for 30 years, it should be trivial to have saved well over $2.6million. They should, in fact, be able to save well over double that over 30yrs giving you the equivalent of that $200k a year in benefits.
bullshit that the "average" googler is making $400k after just five years, come on, thats just fantasy football.
remember Google employs people like HR and Accounts Receivable and lots of rank-and-file tech
there's really nothing more to do than come back here in twenty years and comment on what will be a flood of stories with titles like:
"Ask HN: was once a staff engineer at Google but since I turned fifty no one will hire me and all new jobs require fluent Mandarin. I'm running out of money, advice?"
The typical HN reader at this point hasn't even experienced a downturn.
You're way off on your compensation figures and comparisons.
New Federal workers don't even get a pension, and the max pay band in the highest CoL areas is $164,200/year. Note that it would typically take decades of experience to reach that, as tenure factors in a lot on which pay band you're in.
You're also vastly overestimating how much police and firefighters make. You're looking at the outlier figures and acting as if it's the norm.
How sustainable are those retirement benefits/pensions given the finances of many states and municipalities? There is already news about pension cuts, etc in several places and it will likely get worse in the future.
Basically you depend on the local government to make good financial decisions (the fact that your pension is so high might be a counter-signal to that).
If you work in top tech companies and save enough, possibly with the option to relocate to cheaper areas when retired, you can have more ensured returns from investing judiciously in bonds/stocks.
Should you trust your own responsibility to manage finances or the local government you work for?
I don't remember the actual source, so it might just be a funny anecdote.
But I remember reading that after WW2 a lot of US companies were expanding and looking for new headquarters. They'd commission huge research teams to find the best location for the new headquarters, spend a lot of time and effort to find a good place.
A book written about 10 or 15 years after many of these companies found that almost invariably the result of the research placed the best location within a short distance of where the CEO was from/currently lived.
So what you're saying doesn't really surprise me :)
> A dozen years ago, William Whyte, author of the classic book The Organization Man, tried to do just that. The sociologist took his map and phone book and set out to chart which corporate headquarters had gone where and why. Contrary to official rationales, which emphasized corporate enhancement or a disinterested pursuit of the great outdoors, Whyte found that most of the new campus compounds were sited within eight or nine miles of the CEO’s home—a chilling and widely broadcast statistic that jarred with corporate claims about humane treatment for those uprooted in the move.
IBM did this, and cunningly bought land in the weird area where Connecticut cuts into Westchester County, NY. This let them put the HQ near exec homes but routinely threaten to move HQ to the other state in order to extract tax benefits from NY. "Moving" to the other state simply would mean building a new building ~500 feet across the state line, barely changing anyone's commute.
There is the anecdote that after WWII Bonn was favored over Frankfurt as new capital of West Germany because of its proximity to Adenauer’s home town of Cologne.
One other reason proffered for Bonn over Berlin was that Frankfurt was enough of a cultural, industrial and commercial hub that it might continue as capital after reunification. Not even seriously discussed when it unexpected happened with Bonn.
New York, especially Manhattan and nice parts of Brooklyn also have a great public school system. It’s very, very big with dozens of schools. This is critical for any parent obviously.
My kids go to PS11, which is excellent, just a few blocks from Google HQ (I don’t work at Goog) with some real diversity in the classroom, literally kids of all possible colors from around the world. Interestingly, none of the other parents I know work at Google. I wouldn’t mind if that number ... doubled.
Right now we’re looking at middle schools and I am pleased to say the options in district 2 are fantastic, again.
I wondered the same thing and assumed it was a joke. Then I wondered why they didn't say "halved." Oh well. I probably thought about this too much already.
They bought their new building in Boulder for $131 million, which about doubled the available seating. They also expanded their Pittsburgh office in the last few years.
Munich and Zurich are both quite far from the coast.
Of course, they're also expensive cities: Zurich is one of the most expensive in Europe, and Munich is the most expensive city in Germany.
Now, maybe this is because the Google executive team loves throwing away money on the most expensive cities for no reason. But I think a more likely explanation is that the same desirability that drives up prices also makes it more attractive for talent and employers.
Let's be real, what non coastal city has the current talent pool or the cultural draw for the highly educated, politically progressive workforce Google is after? Spoken as someone born, raised, and currently living in the interior of the US. Google invests in proportion to the talent pool, with decently sized and growing offices in Waterloo, Pittsburgh, and Boulder. If tens of thousands of qualifed tech workers were clamoring to work in these locations, I'm sure Google would invest accordingly. But it would be ridiculous to think of Pittsburgh and NY as equals.
I wonder if the banks, who are increasingly branding themselves as "tech companies"[1], are worried about Google and Amazon encroaching on their territory.
My understanding is that at least part of the appeal of NY to Google and Amazon is the quality and quantity of systems engineers at banks and hedge funds.
They definitely are. I left the finance industry in late
2013 after getting an offer in tech for 50% more. My bosses demanded to see the offer letter- they didn't believe me. I eventually acquiesced- and showed the entire team- to make them realize that they can't just keep screwing people out of bonuses, forcing them to work late nights and weekends and expect people to put up with it.
About 6 months later, two others also left for tech. I talked with a friend still at GS, and banks are at least making token moves now to be more attractive- "casual fridays", ping pong table on the floor, etc. Not real change, but it at least shows they are somewhat concerned.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 415 ms ] threadEven if they spent 150k per engineer in relocation costs (1 time fee), it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t make that up in terms of cheaper real estate and lower salaries.
There were obviously some benefits in choosing New York City (and I realize it’s an expansion technically), but still, it’s so......unimaginative.
Would have been a great contrast to Amazon’s bait and switch yesterday.
Are you suggest that elite talent wants lower salaries in the Midwest or Florida as long as they can get a one time relocation payout?
Google might save support staff salaries, but I don't think they'll save engineer salaries with your plan, they might even have to boost them.
I can actually afford a house. My dog has a yard to play in. I haven't been mugged since I left! No one uses my doorstep as a bathroom. My neighbors actually come say hi to me and are invested in forming relationships knowing I won't just up in move in the next year due to housing costs. We have decent enough restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, pool halls, movie theater, mall, etc, and if I really want to, I am within driving distance of the city (edit: for a day trip, no way in hell would it work for me as a commute). Yet, I haven't been back since I left.
I think it's more nuanced than your comment indicates. You might be surprised how many people might take up an offer from Google to move to the boonies (I'm at least one).
A train which sometimes get you there in 45 minutes, sometimes in 60 minutes, sometimes gets cancelled because of (Amtrak signal problems | disabled Amtrak equipment in the Hudson tunnel | overhead wire damage | $ PROBLEM_OF_THE_DAY).
He says while crammed in to an NJTransit train.
Not to be a ass, but where? And please don't just point out a home with no pictures you just found on Zillow, but a place where you've actually been to which has decent property taxes, decent schools, and is safe? And actually a 45 minute commute, not 45 minutes if you ignore the 20+ minutes it takes to drive your car from home to a train station and pay $50+/month to park for a reserved spot.
I ask this because I used to live in a NYC area highrise and always used to think over the about the seemingly fantastic deals in the suburbs. Then I started looking and realized real-estate websites and Google Maps commuting are a far cry from reality.
Here's a great example. 36 Ball Ter, Maplewood. $550K, ~2200 sqft, interior looks newly renovated, looks really nice in pictures. $15.5K(!!) in taxes. With 20% down you're still looking at $3.5K/Month(includes property taxes) on a 30 year mortgage.
If you look at the price history on Zillow or Trulia, it looks like it was flipped (I think that's when the interior renovation was done) late 2017/early 2018, and the price went up to $750k and has plummeted since then. So the property tax assessment is probably on the pre-renovated value, not the renovated value. So whomever purchases this house can expect a fat tax increase when the town reassess the value.
Also, look at the prices between the East and West side of Maplewood. The East side is fairly close to areas that lots of people would prefer not to live in due to safety concerns.
Again, I'm not trying to be an ass or attack you. I'm just trying to present some real numbers so people have a realistic view when they think the greater NYC area is a place you can escape to when you want access to NYC with a medium CoL. NYC is a very high CoL area and moving to the suburbs can hurt (e.g. terrible commute) in unexpected ways, and you still have a high CoL compared to the majority of country.
3.5k a month is affordable to people who make 130k+ a year, which is less than a new grad makes at Google, where this is absolutely cheaper than anything within a comparable commute to google offices in the bay area at all, or around Seattle in school districts of similar quality.
New York Metro is in no way cheap, and I was never trying to make that argument, just that it can be substantially cheaper than the existing major tech hubs.
My comment is that in less desirable locations people need to be paid more to be there if they don't have to be. The cost of living is not really relevant.
In particular, if one anticipates returning to a pricey location later in life (e.g. needing to take care of elderly relatives there), one has to save for retirement at a higher level than if one can stay in the cheaper place forever.
Cost of living comparisons used to justify salary reductions rarely account for such scenarios.
With that said, the numbers can still work out to make it a good financial deal, it's just less automatically true.
If you live in a high cost of living area, but are okay living with roommates you can save a ton of money. More than enough to make up the difference compared to living in a low cost of living area.
You also get better quality of life and a lot more opportunities - meeting people for work/friends/dating. It's also better to have a high salary in order to more easily keep a high salary.
I think you also learn more faster from increased exposure to talented people. I grew up in Buffalo which is a nice and very cheap place, but there was nobody to learn from.
Maybe it will be different in my thirties and forties but right now I want to either live in a (cool) city to work on exiting projects or be travelling. It may sound pretentious to some, but it's what I want.
I would imagine quite a few people feel similarly. In that way a campus in New York City makes sense I believe.
But it's not for lots of people who can afford positive savings in both locations, unless the absolute pay difference is less than the absolute difference in CoL at the level they would maintain in each place; even people who would prefer the lifestyle and environment of a cheaper (often rural) place often spend most of their working life in an area with a more robust economy and higher pay and CoL to increase savings, and then retire to the cheaper place. (A lot of the net domestic migration out from CA is, I suspect, that, as people executing that strategy reach retirement.) And that's not to say anything of how that utilities balance for people who actually prefer the lifestyle and environment of the more expensive location.
Network effects are real.
Des Moines favors people that want to settle down and have a quiet, comfortable suburban life. It is a nice, clean, orderly place with lots of new infrastructure. The landscape is pristine and beautiful. It has all the creature comforts you need. Nothing wrong with that--if anything, Des Moines is a hot real-estate market right now, including surrounding areas like Ankeny--but by definition that doesn't attract ambitious people.
You can have a good career in Des Moines working for big insurance companies etc. (and many do). But it is not a hot house for the upper end of tech talent. You're looking at a different range of talent there.
I'm 24, but that is definitely what appeals to me. The mere thought of working in NYC or other tech hubs is nauseating. I'd feel totally out of place culturally.
But the old IBM campuses outside of NYC are actually like this. They are usually one or two hours from NYC, in really leafy forested areas...basically country side. People commuting from the city to those places (eg Yorktown in West Chester) are the first ones google attracted with their In-City office, they were extremely successful just because they were in the city and IBM wasn’t.
Of course I accept that not everyone wants to live in a city. The point is, though, that you have to make serious sacrifices if that's your first priority -- you need to either accept a long miserable commute, or acknowledge that you're limiting your ability to grow into the top tier of your chosen profession. Cities have very real beneficial network effects for businesses.
I as a white brit enjoyed working (London UK) for an Arab company which was incredibly diverse - just with I had take a language class at night school.
Don't underestimate how much your culture can change, particularly if you're young and go into life with an open mind. It's one thing if you have no desire for whatever might bring you to a big city, but if you do have that desire but are stopped because of the nauseating feeling of how your lifestyle & culture might change, that feeling does pass.
Where in nostrademons' comment did they the parents culture and feelings "wrong"?
The likes of NY, Boston are my perfect city. Everything I need is by my doorstep, don't need to own a car (or use it regularly) and can find not-unreasonable rents if I have roommates and don't stay in cheaper locations. (eg. Allston in Boston)
I work in a Boston suburb and can't imagine staying in such a drab place, unless I had a family, kids and all. Almost everyone there is older than me and almost entirely invested in family living. Everything from conversations to activities lack any sense of freshness and feel routine. Don't get me wrong, people seem to be happy there. But, a lot of it hinges on their family and social relationships built with people over many years.
I don't see myself having either of those things at least till I am in my mid 30s. Even then, I would probably live in a condo where human density is larger, rather than suburban sprawls.
In my experience, suburban living comes at the turning point of the exploration-exploitation curve. People who want to explore, will stay in urban locations and see out new experiences .... Until they start feeling good about a certain local optima and "settle down" on it.
My hypothesis is that tech workers usually slog it out in till they get a job (usually in their early-mid twenties) and then start the exploration phase, that may have come sooner for other majors. As a result they prefer staying in cities for longer and till an older age than other majors.
I have noticed this among my peers, but of course it is anecdotal and have no idea how well it will generalize.
The real problem is that Google is choosing to expand in the neighborhood they are currently in, where the same applies to Amazon should the Long Island City rumors be true. Regional transportation infrastructure already prioritizes midtown and the financial district, and there are tons of distressed areas regionally, that still certainly do benefit from a growing economy all around.
There are several cities I'd be willing to reloc to -- Florida and the Midwest are not in that list (not even Chicago, due to the winter weather). SF, Seattle, Portland, NYC, Boston are at the top of the list. Maybe San Diego or Austin or the DC area.
And we're very small compared to the Search, Cloud, ads, Maps, etc. engineering presences.
Furthermore, the bizarre obsession with city “culture” is completely beyond me and has lead to some pretty regressive housing policies.
The only way to change it into as much of a monoculture as Silicon Valley would be to add tens of millions of tech workers, without adding any attendant employees to service industries. Not gonna happen.
https://amp.businessinsider.com/queens-languages-map-2017-2
I actually haven't come across any other broadly comparable cities in these sort of metrics.
At least, that's my first hand opinion.
Well 2/3 of these don't apply to the Bay Area / SF
Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent. This limits large new offices to large metro areas (5M+ people)
People don't want to relocate to cities where there aren't multiple job possibilities - you lose your job/hate it and don't want to have to relocate to find a new job or you want to move but your spouse can't find a job there because their industry isn't well represented there.
This leads to a reinforcement cycle where new jobs are created in a city, people flock there, found the next generation of companies, new jobs, more people fleeing less attractive cities and so on...
Things that can happen that could break this cycle include - new industries emerging (like tech in the 90s), poor governance, infrastructure in an area forcing companies to find alternatives (like bay area right now), new skills coming into demand and companies establishing offices to take advantage of that (e.g. Pittsburg emerging as an AI hub, Seattle for 'cloud' skills etc)
This seems especially silly. There are almost limitless people who would like to get one of the FAANG co's on their CV. They'd gladly relocate and benefit from reasonable property prices for a year or three. Google or Netlix are hardly going to struggle to attract talent if they decide to open an office in some rural backwater.
You'd be surprised how attached people are to their spouses or partners. Doesn't matter how badly you want to work at Google, if your spouse is an IP attorney or VP at an academic hospital, as a family you just can't go moving to the middle of nowhere. It's not ALL about being able to work at Google. There's a lot more going on in making these decisions. (At least there is for the type of people that Google would be interested in.)
Much better to be in that NYC-Boston-DC corridor where high powered opportunities abound in multiple sectors. Or SF. Or Chicago. Etc. But trying to move a lot of these types of couples to, say, Lincoln Nebraska, is just asking for trouble. The spouses or partners are definitely not going to go for that.
You might pass on opportunities for social stability reasons in middle age, but as a 22-year-old you jump without hesitation.
People sometimes migrate back when their own kids are school-aged.
To help shape the future of the community that rasied them?
What was deal with your class? You lived in the middle of knowhere and the only option would have been farming or mining coal or something?
You can always come back to "shape the community" (so american ^^) later
www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/387736/
> Of all respondents, about 54 percent said that they lived in close proximity to where they grew up.
nypost.com/2018/01/11/a-shocking-number-of-americans-never-leave-home/amp/
> 11 percent of survey respondents have never traveled outside of the state where they were born.
For those that have both then sure, it's more nuanced and may come down to which of the two has the better future chances, or to make different decisions. Most potential workers will not be in that situation at all.
I believe the few high profile people who actually make the big decisions will usually have a partner who has a high profile career as well. Those key people wont move because their partner wont move.
And in hotbeds like NYC, with the opportunities all over town, there's little career reason to go somewhere else. If Google left NYC, they'd lose most of their engineering team to other tech firms in the city.
In addition to the reasons you give, there's also whether you like a place. I might (or might not) be willing to make some tradeoffs for a locale that's particularly desirable for recreational opportunities and so forth. But not for an exercise in creating a new city, revitalizing one, etc.
I’m sure Google (etc) could lure a lot of young, single folks out to the hinterlands for a year or two, but retention and recruiting further up the ladder would be awful.
Universities in the US, which—for historical reasons-are often located in rural areas, have similar problems. They solve this through “spousal hires.” This can range from merely coordinating interviews and offers across departments [0] to creating entirely new positions, or even tenure lines, for a rockstar’s spouse.
This can work relatively well for universities, but I’ve never heard of companies doing anything similar. I wonder if you could even get a set of companies to agree to preferentially hire their employees’ spouses, so there’s a more diverse set of options.
[0] The university often kicks in some money so that both departments will be happy with (say) their number three picks, instead of history hiring an unattached rockstar and chemistry getting no one.
Happened to a prof in my university just this year. Had offers from top universities & labs for tenure in CS, but stayed in our rural college town because of his SO.
Don't underestimate the power of network effects and critical mass. The people good enough to get into FAANG also have the abundance of options to specify where they'd like to live and work.
Also: universities, new natural resource discoveries, natural disasters, different regulatory environments, developments in transportation.
I have a hunch that the North Coast of Canada is going to become a huge boom town within my lifetime, but it's likely to take a couple decades, and I don't yet know where the major cities will be. Am tempted to take a Northwest Passage cruise to find out, though.
Bangalore had this problem in the 80's and 90's. The way you beat is, surprising simple.
You just start building colleges and other institutions and make it cheap and easy to study there.
All of a sudden you have a massive pool of young, and hungry people. Then you do things like tax subsidies, and land grants.
And anticipating a specific class of answer: is it always political deadlock in America, or is there something more fundamental that would prevent this from working?
It's that a high-level remote employee at a physical-first company is at a major political disadvantage compared to their onsite peers.
If they did, they could pay 75% of what I'm told they do and still be far and away the most appealing employer for talented engineers in most places.
It’s not an explicit policy and they don’t actively encourage it. But they’ll make it work for the right person - I agree though, don’t go into it thinking you’ll be remote. If you want to work remotely for very high compensation (close to FAANG but not exactly competitive), comsider working at a second tier public tech company like Salesforce or a strong unicorn like Stripe (both of which explicitly support it).
I wish more companies would do what TI did.
TI set up their headquarters in Richardson, TX, where there were very few people with any engineering background. So they opened their own university in order to farm talent, and once it got large enough, they had the state take it over from them. It became the University of Texas at Dallas, and it's now probably the most important university in the southwest for engineering and CS (I've heard the phrase "MIT of the southwest" before, but I don't want to call it that because I went to UTD and that's a bit of an exaggeration).
Yes, many Google employees aren't engineers, and not everyone working there gets paid like one.
You're also off on the stats for the Bay Area as well.
I was attempting to make the point that this statement would only possibly be true for those who insisted on living in Manhattan, and that it isn't even true for that segment.
Also, one bedrooms are luxurious. Advice for anyone looking for an apartment in Manhattan: don't waste your time on one bedrooms, look for studios. You pay an unnecessary premium for the extra wall, and it ultimately just makes the space less usable. You can find larger, nicer, better located studios for much less than you'd be paying for a one bedroom.
People, Americans particularly, overestimate the space a human being needs to thrive. I know several families who are healthy and happy in two- and three-bedroom apartments. They pay reasonable rents uptown or a forty minute subway ride out of Manhattan in Jersey or Queens. That’s much better than almost any metropolis, where sprawl makes the density gradient gentler and thus commute times between cost zones longer.
Firstly, to be perfectly frank, you can get 2, 3 years into your first kid before a studio makes a practical difference over a 2-bedroom apartment. For the first chunk, keeping the crib in your bedroom for ease of care is pretty normal, and once the kid is mobile chances are they're going to be sneaking into your bed to sleep at every opportunity anyway.
Secondly, the average length of ownership of a house in the US is like 7.5 years. A lot of people never make it through their 30 year mortgage because they either move for work, their circumstances change and they need more or less house or their income changes and they can/can't afford a nicer, bigger house than they could before.
So living in a studio well into baby #1 before deciding to trade up to a larger place when it's time to look for the "good" schools or baby #2 is on the way is kind of a perfectly normal way to go about things?
Could you please expand on this rule? Where did it come from? Feels like impossibility in some countries.
It’s not a law and it certainly doesn’t apply to all people or locations. Some lenders might use it as a heuristic though.
3x is a benchmark of what is affordable, not a law or a specific financial lending regulation.
Downside is you need a car or take one of the Peter Pan buses. Could Amtrak to Rhinecliff and taxi.
Now they may choose to rent, as I do, but that's because there are some big flexibility advantages to renting compared to buying.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/05/030905.asp
[2] http://time.com/money/collection-post/2792048/how-much-shoul...
[3] https://smartasset.com/mortgage/buy-a-home-for-2-5x-your-sal...
How would Elysium play out if many people could simply move there?
The larger problem is how do the other cities compete at all in the future?
Smart cities are building out train based metro systems that connect their major universities and their airports to their downtown areas. (Houston for example). But that's REALLY expensive. It's not a coincidence that Houston, a city flooded with energy wealth, is one of the few cities pursuing such a strategy. They're one of the only cities that can afford it. What about everyone else? I think the other cities will need to get aggressive and creative about making themselves appeal to the bottom lines of tech companies.
If not, yeah, most will likely be left behind. Sad, but that's how the market works. Just ask Gary Indiana.
It's just one aspect of city attractiveness, but embracing urbanism, especially in terms of multimodal transportation options, does seem to help.
It genuinely amazes me that remote tech jobs haven't taken off. I just can't fathom why—unless companies have honestly found that it doesn't work for some reason unknown to me. What other incentive could there be? You get good workers at a fraction of the cost. And with companies like Google and Amazon spreading out across the U.S., remote teleconferencing systems are already set up. Is it really that much different to have someone dialing in to Mountain View from Idaho rather than NYC?
These aren’t insurmountable problems, you just have to get used to a different way of working. It’s not remotely the same as working in the same office. Better in some ways, worse in others.
Google is one of the few companies with the resources to try to drastically improve the technology and fix this problem, but they instead decided just to double down on consolidating their staff in big offices. Obviously works for them but it’s a shame.
Edit to add: the above doesn’t necessarily preclude remote offices, but one of the problems is that it’s hard to get a good productive remote team started without a nucleus of strong local staff. It’s hard for a company like Google to open a big office in a new city without an established tech base, and videoconferencing tech doesn’t help much.
I'm a googler, and this is completely wrong. Google absolutely wants to fix the remote work issue. Nearly every meeting room in the company is equipped with videoconferencing equipment, and "dialing in" is an accepted practice, with people occasionally dialing in from home being quite common. Hell, they sell their videoconferencing stuff to other companies even, so the monetary incentive is certainly there.
But fully remote work also introduces organizational problems that current tech, at least, does not overcome.
This puts remote workers behind quite a ways. My old team was partially located in NYC and partially located in the Bay Area. There was a major difference in inter and intra location interactions and it affected the team in some negative ways.
But not to the extent of encouraging fully remote work, or even of opening offices in many locations (as they formerly did).
I know they use videoconferencing a lot and they even sell it, but they still co-locate teams and they still expect people to come into the office most days, right?
It’s surprising to me that Google in particular is anti-remote given that all their products are so internet-focused. Yes, it’s probably unfair to expect more from them than from others.
It used to be that jobs where distributed as every town had their own businesses, but the work itself was centralized as one business mainly served one area.
What has happened is that large companies can now distribute their work all over the planet without the need for local branches. All the action is at the headquarters and therefor jobs are being centralized.
You can compare this to, say, how we used to and now use e-mail.
No they don't. Tax breaks aren't enough. One of the big reasons a lot of people really like NYC is that it's one of the few cities in the US that actually feels like a city. NYC is urbanist in a way that relatively few American cities are (and most of the other cities in this category are also big economic winners, like SF and Boston).
How many of those more conservative/cheaper US cities actually take walking/biking/transit over driving as a serious issue? Virtually none of them that I've seen, they put in token efforts at best; an unprotected bike lane here, a "technically counts as transit" bus stop there, but very little that really moves the needle or challenges the status quo.
Name one of these cities, and I'll show you how they're failing miserably on at least this front just by a quick look at Google Maps.
* The MAX has decent reach, but it's severely handicapped in capacity and speed by running at-grade. The Portland metro cheaped out there, and the result is a train system that's only good by American standards.
* Many of the MAX stops, you can go a block or three and hit single-family homes (mandatory single-family homes, I think). To spend billions on a transit system, and then intentionally handicap its usage by strictly limiting how many people can live nearby around its stations...that's just completely insane. What are they thinking? "Better make sure as few people as possible can actually use this enormous investment"?
* No bus lanes that I'm aware of, or at least few enough that a multiple-time visitor didn't see them, so buses are stuck in general traffic.
* Very few physically protected bike lanes, in spite of its reputation as a bike-friendly city. The sum total value of bike improvements prior to the Orange Line was I believe estimated at around 60m, which is probably like a hundredth of one percent of the value of the roads and other stuff built for cars.
* Despite ostensibly being a major city, most of the residential areas are zoned very low density.
* Those very low density areas also generally have no commercial/retail activity allowed, which particularly hurts walkability: part of walkability is being able to, y'know, walk to things.
Most of what I wrote here, you could apply in some form to nearly every US city.
Also every Canadian city, with some very rare exception to the bus lanes bit (there are like... two in Toronto).
> Those very low density areas also generally have no commercial/retail activity allowed, which particularly hurts walkability: part of walkability is being able to, y'know, walk to things.
The other things are more a matter of preference, while I think zoning insanity is the clear leader in making North America's cities and towns tend to be so tedious and isolating.
> Very few physically protected bike lanes, in spite of its reputation as a bike-friendly city. The sum total value of bike improvements prior to the Orange Line was I believe estimated at around 60m, which is probably like a hundredth of one percent of the value of the roads and other stuff built for cars.
For all the investments of Dutch urban centres in bicycle infrastructure, it seems to me that it is the culture which makes or breaks this. As a more-than-commuter cyclist, I can say with confidence that a clumsy protected bicycle lane is more dangerous for cyclists (but quicker for motorists) than none at all. Most protected bicycle lanes are clumsy. Here in Hamilton (mid-tier city in Ontario), a lot of the roads are one-way (which has some benefits and drawbacks, the bus routes look funny), but on these one-way roads, the city of hamilton has installed protected two-way cycle paths. Now, these are convenient, to be sure, but you can imagine that when you get on a one way road, you do not expect oncoming traffic, this leads to all kinds of precarious situations, and (among other factors here) probably some deaths.
Zoning laws are changing and have changed to allow infill. Plus, there is an urban growth boundary which will force higher density.
The bottlenecks in Portland are the bridges and there is at least one bridge that cars can't drive on, only busses and transit and there will be more in the future.
There are entire streets where vehicle through traffic has been blocked in favor of bicycles. There are still bike lanes on the major roads a block away too which is why you probably didn't notice the dedicated streets.
Portland is being upzoned all over the place. look at any major street west of 82nd and you will see new apartment buildings on almost every block. The suburbs of Portland haven't caught up, but in 20 years if trends continue in both places I could see Portland being more dense than San Francisco and the suburban sprawl not ending till the sierras.
Yes it is. It limits how long the train can be, because it can't block traffic downtown, which limits its capacity.
It also limits how fast it can travel. Having its own lanes is better than not, of course, but not as good as being completely physically separated. For an example of this that I'm particularly familiar with, a big part of Caltrain's unreliability comes from it having so many at-grade crossings.
> Zoning laws are changing and have changed to allow infill.
Yes, but very slowly. The current state is that they're extremely bad. Less extremely bad than the US average, probably, but still extremely bad nonetheless.
> There are entire streets where vehicle through traffic has been blocked in favor of bicycles.
Yes, and that's a good move. Would love to see more of those across the city. The way Portland has done it isn't as good as, say, Munich, but it's still a nice thing.
> There are still bike lanes on the major roads a block away too which is why you probably didn't notice the dedicated streets.
Eh, I mean the neighborhood greenways are good, don't get me wrong, but there should still be more off-street paths and physically protected lanes on arterials.
> look at any major street west of 82nd and you will see new apartment buildings on almost every block.
I'm aware of the steady upzoning in Portland, and that's good. It's still true that they're decades away from the kind of urbanism that many cities in, say, Western Europe take for granted as the norm, where "only single family home" areas do not really exist in major cities.
You are comparing Portland to European cities which is not a fair comparison. Compared to any city in California, Portland is miles ahead.
That still limits its speed for that area, and its capacity everywhere.
> You are comparing Portland to European cities which is not a fair comparison. Compared to any city in California, Portland is miles ahead.
Nah, transit usage is much higher in SF, and BART + Caltrain + Muni is better than Portland's system.
Anyway, like I said, Portland is one of the better US cities for urbanism, it's just that that's a bit like claiming to be a more honest-than-average politician.
No bus lanes, but buses aren't just stuck in general traffic. Portland has a system that gives them priority at stoplights: https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2016/03/what_are_the_bl...
That depends on what you value.
* SF's transit, while indeed bad, is still superior to all but a handful of other US cities.
* Similarly, SF is top tier for walkability and bikeability.
* SF has more cultural and ethnic diversity than most cities, especially since it's the principal city of a metro with a ton of immigration.
* SF has a LOT of interesting stuff that goes on (partially as a result of the previous point). Concerts and walks and other cultural events.
* Also as a result of the diversity, SF's food scene is really excellent.
* I'm not personally much of a fan, but a lot of people actually like SF's weather.
* SF is very left wing, and a lot of people in tech like that. Not everyone, but a lot of people.
The things you listed as problems largely are real problems of course, but there's a reason so many techies still choose to live in SF even if they work in Mountain View, and that's something your theory here doesn't explain: why not live in the closer, somewhat cheaper, and less crime/homeless-filled South Bay?
Your list of problems just reveals your own preferences: you prefer the advantages of the suburbs to the advantages of the city. Nothing wrong with that, but not everyone shares your preferences.
> quality of living is considerably lower.
See my other nearby comment for why this is a "it depends" thing. A lot of people would consider living in Kansas City to have lower "quality of life" than NYC even if it's less crowded and it's much easier to afford a house.
Your comment itself illustrates the disconnect here: we have one side arguing that the other side is wrong in what they want, ala
"Why don't more techies want to come here?? This is ridiculous!"
"Well, because they want to live in places with X Y Z even if they're expensive and crowded."
"Well, they should care more about A B C instead (because I do)."
I'm guilty of this, but I think your formulation is a straw man. All I want to tell people is that they shouldn't reflexively rule out the middle of the country, because a lot of people really would be happier there. Not everybody, but some people.
And the way (some people on) the coasts talk about the Midwest and the South is as though they're a complete and total non-starter that's out of consideration entirely. "Yeah, New York's expensive, but what am I going to do? Live in Cleveland? Obviously I can't do that!"
I think that kind of talk convinces a lot of people who would be happier somewhere else that they shouldn't even bother looking into those places. And that's a tragedy of human flourishing.
Edit to respond to one comment below:
> I think you're dismissing people's issues too easily.
On the contrary, I think you're inordinately focused on your own particular (and somewhat eccentric) issues. Most Americans prefer car ownership. You might think they're wrong to prefer this. I do, too! But, "I don't want to live somewhere where I have to own a car" isn't a mainstream American opinion.
My spouse and I would love to move somewhere less expensive than NYC, but we just can't make it work. We're both in fairly specialized tech fields, and prioritize walkability, diversity, great schools and career growth opportunity. Outside of say Chicago, it's hard to come up with a place that checks those boxes.
If a person values a thing, saying, "well [thing] exists in these other cities too, there's just a whole lot less of it there" is maybe not a super effective counterpoint.
Like, I realize that basically every major city in the US does have public transit...technically. But pointing out that out is not useful when for most of those cities, said transit is slow, unreliable, sparse, and infrequent.
I don't just want transit. I want good transit. I don't just want walkability in a few isolated neighborhoods. I want widespread walkability.
However, unless your working in medical devices I wouldn't call it a hub like New York, Boston or the valley.
My wife is even harder on this line than I am. We live in Munich now, and the biggest reason she doesn't want to come back to the US is that she doesn't want to go back to driving everywhere, and there are only a few cities where a family can reasonably and easily get away without a car.
Car ownership is a multi thousand dollar expense, every year. Many people would be happier with that cash in their pocket.
Firstly, I recognize this is just one factor. I focused on it because it's one I'm highly familiar with, not because it's the end-all be-all. I've already pointed this out in multiple comments. We could also talk about educational opportunities or tolerance/discrimination, but those things either aren't as clear cut or would be more contentious to discuss.
Americans saying they prefer cars when you ask makes sense when you consider the other options are usually hilariously bad wherever they live, and where they've lived in the past, too. Give them an option where walking and biking and transit actually work, and suddenly many people find those options desirable. Just look at how many American tourists say they love the transit system in, say, Tokyo, when they visit. Americans mostly "love cars" because they've been given no other serious options.
Lastly, while many people may not think of it in explicit terms, they may nonetheless enjoy some of the knock-on effects of urbanism, like a city "feeling more lively".
I focused on it in my original comment mostly just because it's an area I'm particularly familiar with, and it's an area where the cities that are supposedly "desperate" are hardly doing anything at all. (Not that I blame the local governments for that, really, I realize the local residents mostly want their cities to stay that way)
I wonder if the real situation is that it's easier to attract young "top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs." That's also tends to be kind of talent that's willing to work way more than is really good for them. The suburban lifestyle is more suited for established families and older "top talent."
> older "top talent."
Older top talent often has the resources to actually buy houses even in expensive areas, anyway.
Maybe at the toppest-top, but it's a struggle for anyone with even a high normal-range income to buy a home in the Bay Area.
- LIC Queens high rises have 2/2 rentals that go for $17k/mo. ~ 1200sq feet. High floors. Ok views. Ok buildings. - In Manhattan those are $22k-$30k/mo in newer buildings and $15-20k/mo in older hifg rises.
They aren't full of tech bros. They are full of finance and attorney bros. I have an acquaintance that lives in one. He is one of the portfolio managers for one of the hedge funds. He is a salary only manager. By the standards of NYC apartments qualification, it means his take home after taxes has to be at around 65k/mo as proven by his tax returns for last two years.
But you're absolutely right that a lot of new college grads want to live in the city and maybe not even buy a car.
The majority of the established workers already own houses in the suburbs, exurban areas, and even NH. For many of them, a location that's actually in the city is a bug, not a feature.
Of course there is some cost to not collocating employees. Google has decided new offices are worth this cost, and thus Google can decide to allocate building/location resources based on employee preference alone (let's assume the other factors are somehwat insignificant, which could be valid taking into account the high proportion of labor cost).
If every additional dollar spent on a given location buys the same amount of office space and equipment in both the urban and suburban areas, then it would make sense to divide the budget for offices according to the proportions of the labor pool preferences. Now of course, a dollar in SF buys a lot less office space than a dollar in Lexington, so that should be a accounted for in budgeting decisions, as well as overhead costs involved in opening a new location.
If we look at Google's actions under this framework, it doesn't make much sense for Google to devote as much of their office budget to highly urban areas as they do, unless the proportion of current and potential employees that prefer ruralism is very low. I would find that difficult to believe. Of course there are other factors to consider, but the trend is what I mean to highlight.
That being said, the true proportion would have to be discovered, and company culture may not allow people to express their true desires. This would apply to many tech giants.
* The nature of "suburbs" is that they don't scale well. They're not meant to, suburbs are supposed to be the thing on the outside, not the thing everyone comes to. And while costs may be lower in some ways, they may be higher in others: like how Google has to run its own fleet of shuttles to go to Mountain View, because transit is inadequate. They don't do that in NYC.
* Google has a cultural preference for being environmentally friendly. Suburban style living and working is more energy intensive and less environmentally friendly than its urban counterpart.
* There's a large contingent of people that are united in their support for companies like Google to open an office in a more suburban city, somewhere, but I suspect that if you actually tried to pick a particular city, suddenly that support would fracture into a million pieces.
Thing is, renting a 900 sq foot apartment in any reasonably urban area has gotten pretty expensive anywhere. It was about 1000-1500$ in KC when I left. It's about 1600-2200 in Seattle. My salary jump from KC to Seattle more than makes up for the difference in rent. Other things may be slightly more expensive, but I don't really notice.
Major difference is you can buy a house in Kansas City, but even that is starting to get expensive - at least in the areas that I would like to buy a house in. Even Grand Rapids, Michigan is having its own housing crisis. At least the salaries are already high in coastal towns. That said, I sometimes feel like I was saving up enough money to buy a house back in the midwest.
This is also what San Francisco suffers from. It goes from city to essentially suburb extremely quick. While cities like New York, Paris and Tokyo just go on and on. Of course we only talk about those examples because they have developed that way over decades.
Historically, yes. But I'd argue that there are a lot of US cities that got pretty hollowed out by white flight and other factors to the degree that there were essentially no desirable parts of town. What's happened is that any number of those cities now have a revitalized urban core (however small) and living in that small core with the dozen or so restaurants you can walk to, maybe some small markets, new condos, etc. is pricey.
I've either worked in or spend a fair bit of time in a few of those places. The few dozen square blocks on gentrified core is pretty nice as a visitor but it's pretty small.
It seems there is exactly one reliable way to make this assessment. Look at where people move to. The large cities with the most rapid growth are (from Forbes 2018 list[1]):
1) Boise, ID
2) Seatle-Bellevue-Everett, WA
3) Dallas-Plano-Irving, TX
4) Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL
5) Fort Worth-Arlington, TX
6) Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, NV
7) Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, TN
8) Austin-Round Rock, TX
9) Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL
10) Tacoma-Lakewood, WA
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2018/02/28/full-l...
Not necessarily. Many cities strictly limit how much housing they have, such that there is a hard limit on the number of people who could feasibly live there. SF is a good example of this, since it's also small and geographically constrained. Saying "well, the net increase in people was small, so therefore it must be that not so many people want to live there" is not necessarily true if physically the city cannot accommodate many more people due to regulations.
Looking at where people move to is useful, yes, but high housing prices are themselves often a marker of desirability, particularly in supply-constrained markets.
I mostly grew up in the city, in a small apartment, but for a while we did live in the Midwest, in a big house. The only problem with apartment living was that we had too much furniture we didn’t need from when we lived in the Midwest.
I occassionally work from home, and I need a seperate office with a door to do that. Also, I just like having some space to get away from the rest of the family for a while.
Like you, it's what I'm used to from when I grew up, so that probably plays a big part in my preference.
That's a projection of your subjective preference.
1200 sqft is not enough space for just me, that's my subjective preference. I currently occupy a home by myself with about ~2,500 sqft. I don't utilize all the space regularly. My bills would not go down by much if I reduced that space to, say, 1,500 sqft. Housing where I live is spectacularly affordable. I consider not having to live in a tiny, cramped space to be a quality of life benefit. I enjoy that my kitchen is the size of a small studio in San Francisco or NY, and it costs me perhaps $120 per month as a share of my mortgage.
That's an incredibly broad overstatement. There are plenty of people, including "techies," who still want a suburban home with a car.
There's a lot of talk in this thread that assumes that tech workers all want to live a minimalist lifestyle in a dense urban area (or even worse: that they should want to live that way). That's frankly false. I assume what's really going on is that people are projecting their parochial preferences onto a large group that's much more diverse than they understand.
Something like ~2500 sqft. sounds amazing to me, as long as it is all on one floor.
Here’s why people who can end up electing to live in a place like NYC and here's why the NYC is the economic winner.
I pay $3400/mo for 2400 3bd 2bath two floor apartment with a private backyard ( mine ). If I had a car, I could have parked in in a back - I don't because I have 27 zip cars available within a five minute walk. I also have Maven, Cars2Go and Enterprise -- I have an account with Maven because it is free and I only need to pay for usage of cars.
My commute to work is ~35 minutes door to door - which includes walking and a subway. When the L goes down for two years, I will have J and M and my commute at most will increase by 45 minutes. It won't affect me as I will just adjust my hours to avoid the rush hour shitshow caused by the stupidity of MTA and NYC politicians. Employers of NYC know about it and based on my informal polling seem to be willing to accommodate those who would be affected. I have an unlimited monthly metrocard which gives me all the needed access for about $130.
I have 3 super markets within a 10 minute walk, 1 CVS/1 Wallgreens/1 Rite Aid. I rarely have to use Uber, but if I do, it takes ~4 minutes for me to get one where I live. If I needed a doctor or a dentist, there are dozens within 15 minute walk. There are walkin medical centers, including the ones that are open 24x7 within a 20 minute walk. If I needed a proper hospital with ER, it can be accessed in about ~15 min. And some of the best hospitals in the country are at most with crazy traffic over Williamsburg bridge or Queens Midtown tunnel are ~45 minutes away.
If I feel like getting the biggest variety of produce or proteins or wine for cooking or entertaining, I have access to all suppliers in Chinatown, Koreatown, farmers markets (Union Sq farmers market makes other farmers market look like a stale 2 week old french fry), butchers and Hunts Point Terminal ( in addition to ethnic grocery stores and ethnic markets). All of them are accessible by the subway. Most of them deliver. Same day. Well. not Huntspoint but that’s where I can get whole wild caught King Salmon for $9/lb -- the same price that a distributor that sells to a distributor that sells to the vendor who sells to your supermarket for $22/lb pays. Except that I get it 7 days earlier and $13/lb cheaper. You get the idea.
Depending on how much time I want to spend "commuting" (subway ~ 45min max ) I have somewhere between 3 ( walk of of the door ) to 20 ( ten minute on L, J/M (per train/per direction, not total) to 50 (fifteen minutes) to > 400 (35 minutes) coffee shops/bars/restaurants/lounges/nightclubs. This includes the best restaurants in the country that a person who does not live in NYC needs a 3 months in advance to get a reservation at -- I can stroll into them and get a table in an hour worst case scenario simply because I'm out enough which means I run into people who work in or own those restaurants socially. I’m doing it this weekend - wife’s birthday so we are hitting four hottest places in 4 days, three of which are “not reservable until some time in January”. I made calls yesterday -- happen to meet one of the chefs at a party, the other was sitting next to me in a little bistro where a photographer friend of mine works during the day ( he introduced us ) and two others are industry regulars so I know them from the other places they used to work at.
It also includes hole in a wall places that prove access to all kind of ethnic food ( I live in a PR/Dominican neighborhood which borders Polish/Eastern European and African-American neighborhood) really cheap - $20 would feed a family of 4 for at least 2 days. If for some reason I’m itching so socialize with 20 year olds, I can replace my Italian off the runway jacket that my wife picked up on her way home for $200 (it just has a cut on the inside label to in...
> $3400/mo for 2400 3bd 2bath two floor apartment with a private backyard
though I prefer single floor condos more, and don't want to pay that much in rent. But, that's 20 years too early to be talking about it.
___
I stay in Boston right now, and Charles bordering Boston-Cambridge neighborhoods are similar to how you describe NYC living, just on a smaller scale.
* Very few miles of protected bike lanes, although at least things are looking up there for the future: https://bicyclecoalition.org/our-campaigns/30-miles-of-prote... (although the fact that 30 miles is celebrated as some big achievement is itself telling)
* Two subway lines is better than most US cities, but still not very many for a metro of this size. Munich has a comparable metro population and has 8 subway lines, for example, not to mention several separated-grade commuter/rapid transit lines that go way out into the burbs. Looks like high quality, rapid transit is still close by for only a small percentage of Philadelphians. It also sounds like the regional rail system is in disrepair.
* Looking at the zoning map, it looks like implementation of mixed use zoning is much better than most US cities, but still very limited in many neighborhoods, which limits walkability: https://openmaps.phila.gov/
* Also from the zoning map, many areas are still zoned just for single-family homes, which limits walkability/bikeability (and also encourages economic segregation, to boot).
Philly's level of urbanism should really be like the bare minimum for US cities, but in reality it's close to the top, I think.
A lot of the homes are single family, or row homes. This results in swaths of a residential feel in a city. Even the hot Fishtown felt very rural to me after my stint in New York. Although I appreciate the quite. Looking at the history Philadelphia started with the idea of brownstones/row homes instead of apartment buildings. To give people more space. But this does result in sparseness of shops. A lot of the multi tenant buildings are either new constructions or converted warehouses.
The two subways is always a point of contention. But I don't find it that big of a deal. Living near either Broad or MFL, I can get around very easily. The city is also extremely walk able, a majority of the people I knew just walk. It's under two miles river to river. If not that there are a number of buses. http://skookul.com/ <| For real time public transit.
I can't speak regional rail. But when I left ~15, commuting from Delaware was a shit show.
In the city bike lanes I don't think is the best. But the river trail along the west side is well used. I know a number of people up in outer Manayunk bike in. https://schuylkillrivertrail.com/
Having just taken a history walking tour. How the city feels makes alot of sense. It's meant to feel like a number of connected neighborhoods. I still think it deserves a second look for tech companies. With all the universities and good start to transit. It's ripe for an investment outside of Comcast.
0 - https://twitter.com/ismetroonfire?lang 1 - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/washington-d-c-s-metro-...
* I see a few off-street bike paths, but at a glance, no physically protected bike lanes. Maybe there are a few I'm missing, but if so, very few. Very few bike lanes in total, too.
* Freeways cutting through the city
* City is super sprawled out, looks like most of the space is the typical American mandatory single-family home area with no retail activity, so walkability is limited even where the sidewalks are fine.
* Very wide roads all over the place
Also just in general Detroit seems like it's been historically mismanaged and has lots of problems with crime and infrastructure and corruption and poor schools, which doesn't help things.
So, look, it's totally fair to say, "I don't want to live in a city like that." But there are people working really hard to make their little pockets better for bikes and pedestrians and so on, and I think people underestimate the extent to which that's going on and the extent to which they could be happy in a neighborhood like that, especially when housing is 1/10th the cost.
Sure, but how useful is that, really? Huntsville has a New Urbanist neighborhood that looks nice and cute, but the rest of Huntsville (which I have lived in before) fucking sucks for anything that's not a car. As soon as you need to go anywhere else, you gotta go back into driving, and only driving.
> If you're moving to St. Louis or Cincinnati, then you'll need to do some research. The dart is a bad strategy.
I don't dispute that you can mitigate the effects somewhat via careful selection. But:
* That only works for those particular neighborhoods. You're probably not gonna always stay in those, so you're still going to need to at least own a car, and probably make at least somewhat frequent use of it if you want to go to other places in the area.
* You're probably also looking at other things you want in a neighborhood: crime rate, school quality, restaurants, other points of interest, etc. Having to only look at a few neighborhoods as viable urbanist-friendly locations greatly constrains your options when it comes time to look at the other dimensions.
> I think people underestimate the extent to which that's going on
Maybe other people do, but I'm a dorky-ass urbanism nerd who reads blogs on this shit all the time, so I don't. I'm well aware of what's going on. But I also travel enough to know that these cities are so woefully behind most of the rest of the developed world, it would take literal CENTURIES to catch up at the current snail's pace of improvement. Changes that happen after I'm dead are of no use to me.
That said, the experience in the downtown/midtown core of Detroit has improved drastically since the bankruptcy. It feels incredibly vibrant. When I started working there in 2012, the city felt completely empty after about 5:30. Today, downtown is buzzing seemingly all night.
Even if you live within walking distance of your office, though, you still need a car to get groceries though, and as much as it sucks, I don't see how that changes anytime soon (or within my lifetime).
Do you really think NYC is a good example of this? I found the car traffic horrific, cycling is variable at best and downright dangerous at worst. The subway is pretty amazing but massively under-invested.
Even most UK cities which have longer levels of history restricting what can be done for cyclists are better than NYC.
I had a lot of fun, and I wish I could've stayed another week, but actually living and working there? No thank you. I actively do not want to fight through crowds and run to catch connecting trains just to get to and from work every day. I don't want to live in a tiny apartment with no cooling but a room air conditioner sticking out the window. I don't want to be surrounded by noise 24/7.
Trust me, for every person who wants to live in NYC because it's actually a city, there's at least one person like me who only wants to set foot in cities to play tourist and would rather live and work in the suburbs.
And I'd rather live in modern suburbs at that... in NYC suburbs like Westchester (where I stayed during my trip), the housing stock is so old that even a nice place will be a fixer-upper, and the street layout is horrendously bad because nothing was planned in advance. I strongly prefer living in southwestern suburbs where nothing is older than the late '70s, half the neighborhoods were built in the 21st century, and the suburbs are built around a one-mile grid of six-lane divided highways (e.g. Dallas, Vegas, Phoenix).
Want the crowds, the city life and the noise? Live downtown. Old-school New York? The upper west side. Brownstones on quiet, beautiful streets? Any number of Brooklyn neighborhoods. A quaint New England-y fishing village? City Island. Conservative-leaning, leafy suburbs? Staten Island. The ethnic enclave of your choice? Peppered throughout the city. Cheapo cool kid artist communities? Bushwick/Ridgewood. Want to own a boat and live on the water? The Rockaways. The list goes on and on, and that's not even touching Jersey, Westchester or Long Island.
The beauty of the city is that all of these places are unquestionably, culturally 'New York'. They're also, for the most part, quite well connected to the city core on affordable public transit, and in many cases quite affordable by big American city standards.
For example: I was issued a ticket in SF for moving (and I hired professionals to do it). That kind of crap simply doesn't happen in New York, but it happened routinely in SF.
I'd actually argue that the quality of street / park trees is the best way to judge how competently a city has been run over time. When a city has lots of healthy older trees, that means not a single administration has dropped the ball in over 200 years or whatever. If look around NYC there are thousands of mature American elm trees everywhere, but not in any of the surrounding suburbs. Why? Because NYC parks department actually takes care of the trees when they're sick and removes them if they can't be saved, whereas all of the surrounding tri-state towns just let them infect the surrounding trees and then die.
Now maybe the fact that Robert Moses's favorite tree was the sycamore should have been a hint to everyone that some of his other policies may have been suspect, but that's a different issue.
I often wonder about why relatively conservative /cheap/low-density/car-bound are so correlated.
Are there significant counter-examples, in the US or elsewhere, where, for example, a more conservative area is higher density or urban, compared to it's more progressive surroundings?
If those situations are very rare, then why? Is it strictly historical, or does relatively higher density, and more frequent interactions that result, change many people's perceptions.
I think you’re conflating current cultural preference with actual economic ability. Where do towns like Palo Alto, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale fit into this?
It surprises me that the US was ever different. I'm wondering whether it's a young country effect.
I don't think it's "Elysium" as claimed. It's more like - if you're competitive and want to be the best in a field, you're probably (not always) going to move to London.
If you want to live a life, raise a family, buy a house, etc, the status game isn't that relevant, and you don't need to bother with it.
It's the same on a global scale too - if you're playing that game, there's a hierarchy of 'best paying, most status-giving' _countries_. The most keen will move across the world.
The UK doesn't have labour mobility with the rest of Europe. Even within the EU it's not as simple as 'move from Poland to France and get a job'.
Most of the countries have different languages.
"Europe" isn't a country.
The Poles have no problem moving everywhere in Europe working construction jobs.
Hell the Russians have no problem spending summers working in the part of Florida I vacation at.
Tech opportunities are still going to cities, especially those with the biggest companies, but it's spreading to more and more cities and tech companies now know they need to expand to other markets to reach new talent.
I think overall the US would have a better quality of life if industry was not so concentrated in major cities. Fewer people would need to make trade-offs between their jobs and lifestyle.
1. The traffic and noise in Midtown is downright oppressive. People just laying on their horns for basically no reason, giant trucks speeding by the mass of pedestrians.
2. Yes, too many people. This is also Midtown specific. I don't mind crowds and I like a busy streetscape, but Midtown reaches a level that's dystopian. I dread walking on the avenues during rush hour. People spill out into the street, because there's not enough sidewalk to contain them all and it's basically impossible not to bump into people the entire way. I'm a fast walker. I hate walking slow. Midtown is very frustrating in a very minute-to-minute kind of way. (See #1 for some ideas about how we could give people more space. Hint: less space for cars.)
3. I would like to own my own home. I don't see how that's going to be practical here.
4. I like building stuff. In my hometown I had lots of tools and the space to work on projects. I don't have the space for any of that here.
5. I'm a cyclist. I prefer to own a couple bikes. I can't do that here. I barely have room for one bike in my 350 sq/ft apartment. It's kind of a pain even having that one bike.
Any one of these could be reason enough to prefer a less crowded and expensive city.
With regard to #1: I’m somewhat hopeful that the new state senate shakeup will get Cuomo’s congestion pricing ideas implemented. Not sure if that will ultimately be good or bad, but it might alleviate traffic.
Different strokes for different people.
The most well known maybe, but not the largest. Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx is more than 3x the size of Central Park
You can see quite a bit more like the Adirondacks you're willing to drive 5-6 hours, but a drive like that isn't suitable for a day hike.
You can also find some smaller trails and untended areas on the outskirts of the city (eg, Marine Park in southeast Brooklyn). But these tend to be.. well small.
Anyway my point is, like most big cities, it's difficult to really get "outdoors" with any measure of convenience.
It's expensive. The fact that it's sometimes held out as being reasonable compared to the Bay Area says more about the Bay Area than NYC.
You can't conveniently/inexpensively own a car. Which is an advantage for some. Not so much for others who like hopping in the car to run a quick errand.
The crush of people all the time.
It's "gritty." Not 1980s gritty any longer but still. (Smell, noise, homelessness (not SF levels but that's an awfully low bar).
Basically, it's an urban landscape on steroids even compared to, say, London. That's not necessarily bad but a few days of it is about my limit.
Those of us who are affluent and live in coastal cities (and similar cities across the world) are, comparatively speaking, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Most of us can’t afford everything around us. But we enjoy - and frequently take for granted - luxuries and technology which billions of other humans can scarcely even conceive of having in everyday life.
Why would godless, latte-sipping, well educated, coastal executives--some of whom weren't even born in this country--want to open up offices in places that have made it abundantly clear they hate people exactly like that?
The consensus is that if Amazon moved here, all they'd accomplish is sending housing prices into the stratosphere and turning traffic into a nightmare. We have plenty of jobs here, and housing prices and traffic are already starting to get problematic. We don't need Amazon throwing gasoline on the fire.
I've also heard discussion about how we don't want Amazon because they could wreck the city's culture like they did to Seattle... and from what I've seen, both the right and the left are pretty unified on this. We like Dallas the way it is, thank you very much.
Got to tell you: few smart people want to live in some anti-civil-rights nightmare where everyone is anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and hopelessly religious. To top it off those states are full of rampant anti-labour provisions: no anti-poaching, no anti-non-compete.
Sorry, the Rust Belt made itself suck. This isn't disturbing. This is righteous.
Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis to name a few
The fact that you write things like this indicates that you are not truly the type of "smart person" that you obviously consider yourself. The real world is not the caricature that you see from your echo chamber.
I eventually asked Google recruiting to put me on a do not contact list after going through the process multiple times.
It definitely seems plausible and matches my (very limited) experience with a few friends that have joined Google, but I was wondering if you have any links.
I guess you would have to accept joining with a lower salary, and then try to switch to another FANG company to get a fair salary?
From my direct experience, and talking to other people who have negotiated with Google, the only ways to get a good offer out of them is to either come from a FAANG or get a competing offer from one.
I thought about that, but I'd rather not put myself through the job change gauntlet so often, and the role was such a step down in responsibility that I would be better off with a year in my current role.
The thing about fintech though is they get worked really hard. It's very much a "You eat what you kill" mentality. On an hourly basis you might be better off "only" making $300K at a FAANG and working normal 40 hour work-weeks.
Source: recently interviewed with a few top quant funds in NY
Though personally I don't like relying on the subway (which increasingly has problems these days), hence I live in biking distance.
Is that really true? I don't know if this data is accurate but googling "average rent new york city" vs "average rent san francisco" brings up these 2 results as the first hits. They look almost identical. The site claims average rent for NYC is $3634 vs SF at $3735. It also claims prices increased in NYC by 9.46% over last year vs SF at 0.62%
https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren...
https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-new-york-rent-tre...
But, go to the SF burbs and try to find high rises... :/
I remember getting out of college in 2005, hearing about the $3000+ 1BR apartments in NYC, and thinking "Why the hell would anyone want to move to NYC?" (I was living with my parents in Boston at the time, but looked at moving out and would've paid $650 with roommates or about $1100 for a 1BR in that city.) My now-wife was living in SF that same year and paid $1200 in rent.
The huge increases in SF rent happened mostly from 2010-2015. I paid $1400/month for a 1BR in 2009-2010 (Mountain View, not SF, but SF was still < $2000 at the time). By 2014 it was basically impossible to find something < $3000 in any transit-accessible part of the city, and apparently it's leveled off since.
What's living in Hayward like?
Also don't forget Long Island, the Other In State.
(I'm one of the idiots who commutes ~2 hours from near Poughkeepsie, which is (a) still on commuter rail [the super-express Hudson line train takes ~90 minutes, plus the time to get to & from it] and (b) where half of the food you find in NYC farmer's markets comes from. I kinda like it.)
For me, I didn't really take advantage of the city - I like occasionally went to a museum or went out to eat but I mostly just sat on the couch watching TV and surfing the internet. So I moved north and got myself forty acres of tree-covered Bath-Nassau soil with rocky outcroppings. Now my free time is filled with rennovating a 200 year old vernacular house, turning my land into a proper hobby farm, and going to various kitschy festivals and hiking trails with my family. My commute is, frankly, the most relaxing part of my week, where I can sit quietly for 90 minutes and read a book or take a nap or post WoT conspiracy theories on Reddit.
It may not be for everyone, but it's amazing to me that I can have this lifestyle while also commuting to a regular old desk job in the largest city in the country. (It's also amazing to me that I'm part of a multi-century tradition of both commuting to the city from rural upstate and of gentleman farmers coming upstate from the city.)
My personal limit is 12-13 hours out of the house each day; more than that and it burns me out fast. It definitely wouldn't work for me with an employer who was less flexible about when the work day starts or who had expectations of large numbers of hours spent with butt in chair.
If you look at the breakdown by bedroom count:
1BR: SF -> $3303 | NY -> $2939
2BR: SF -> $4481 | NY -> $3752
This makes clear that NY inventory is biased towards larger units, which makes comparisons of overall averages deceptive.
The closest I could find in terms of data was this site- https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/us-average-apart... which compares SF to all of NYC, not Manhattan. The studios are somewhat bigger, the 1BRs slightly smaller, and the 2BRs are on average slightly larger- but the difference is very small.
Price per square foot would shed more light on this, but I don't know of a reliable (free) source of that data.
There are plenty of rent stabilized apartments in NYC, but that's a much different and weaker thing, and isn't comparable to rent control in SF.
You can see some more accurate stats here: https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/24/16925172/nyc-rent-2017-decre...
https://goo.gl/maps/DYvaWBSLFcP2 1h15m from Rye train station to Fulton subway station on a Tue morning
https://goo.gl/maps/TdQN5FhWF132 55m from Pelham station to Fulton subway.
So door to door, you're still looking at 70 min to 90 min commute one way, with the added stress of possibly dealing with train delays. I wouldn't be able to do that more than a couple years.
My point is, if you want a door to door commute of sub 45 min, consistently, then you would need to be in Hoboken/Jersey City/Secaucus/Weehawken/etc. That whole Hudson County corridor doesn't offer much in the way of decent gyms (swimming pools, racquetball/squash courts, basketball, etc), and neither does it have any decent hiking. People don't really have yards there either.
If you move out of that circle, you do start getting some amenities, but your commute starts looking like 45 to 60+min, and you have to park your car at the train station or get dropped off, etc. It's all personal preference, but for me, I would want all the benefits of owning a car, or all the benefits of not needing to own a car. Living in NJ and working in NYC seems like compromising on both.
The train ride from Harrison to Grand Central alone is somewhere around 45 minutes. And unless you work right at Grand Central, you're looking at rushing to make connecting trains. Doing this for a week while exploring the city was fine, but the idea of having to do this every single day until I retire just to make a living would make me want to blow my brains out.
I don't know how my cousin does it. She works in the financial district and takes a 6am train into the city every day. When she gets home, she has just enough time to put her kids to bed before passing out. Now I understand why her husband has a WFH job.
And about that "great family home" thing... the housing stock is so old that every house, even the nice ones, is going to be a fixer-upper. Not long before I got there, they had a plumbing joint break in one of the upstairs bathrooms. Within a few minutes, it wrecked the fixtures in that bathroom, obliterated the ceiling of the kitchen it was above, and did a number on the kitchen counters.
I'm also generally not a fan of how the suburbs are laid out either. Houses are spaced so far apart that it feels like you're living in the country even though you're close to the city (I went trick-or-treating with their kids, and I had to force myself to not brag that my hauls when I was their age were twice as big as theirs because I got to visit twice as many houses in the same amount of time :), and the street layout is twisty nonsense where even the major roads only have two lanes.
No thank you.
I'll gladly visit NYC again (and I'm sad my trip was only one week and not two), but I never want to live there. I'm happy living in Dallas, though I'm considering a move to Las Vegas for political reasons. Either way, both of those are polar opposites of the NYC suburbs.
Lifetime comp (salary + retirement benefits) for Amazonians in Crystal City will probably be less than for comparable Federal workers.
Google is like any other white collar business now - a small cadre of well paid execs surrounded by an army of people just doing ok.
80% of Googlers in NYC will probably have lower lifetime earnings than firefighters or cops once you factor in pensions
These companies are just factories with desks
Most public employees with pensions will probably pull in well over a million after they retire and before they die.
Tech workers are still young as a group so pension envy is still not a thing....but will be
Run the numbers...tech jobs in a tier 1 real estate market isn't that great of a deal. Most likely a nice rental and a slightly underfunded 401k
And don't forget tech is like Logan's Run...have fun looking for work at 50 (when most public employees have started their retirement countdown)
my point was....how much will they "pull in" for the thirty+ years of their retirement?
public employees also don't have to worry about obsessively sharpening their skills every four years or foreign labor or being made irrelevant by cloud services, and they don't care about recessions for the most part
techie Ragnarok is coming within ten years, HN will turn into a giant therapy board
chance of injury in firefighting is very low as structure fires become rare...
No way. How much do you think Google entry level fresh graduate engineers earn in total compensation?
I have a relative who is retired CHP. $200k a year total retirement benefits. Show me a rank and file Googler who has that lined up.
Typical techie trajectory will be maximum salary around age forty and then increasing irrelevance
As I tell everyone in tech now - imagine 64. It's coming.
I have a relative who's retired civil service in Southern California and there was a big dropoff in plan quality after his era.
The average Googler should be making 300-400k+/yr after 5 years. If that Googler is willing to live on a CHP salary for 30 years, it should be trivial to have saved well over $2.6million. They should, in fact, be able to save well over double that over 30yrs giving you the equivalent of that $200k a year in benefits.
remember Google employs people like HR and Accounts Receivable and lots of rank-and-file tech
there's really nothing more to do than come back here in twenty years and comment on what will be a flood of stories with titles like:
"Ask HN: was once a staff engineer at Google but since I turned fifty no one will hire me and all new jobs require fluent Mandarin. I'm running out of money, advice?"
The typical HN reader at this point hasn't even experienced a downturn.
New Federal workers don't even get a pension, and the max pay band in the highest CoL areas is $164,200/year. Note that it would typically take decades of experience to reach that, as tenure factors in a lot on which pay band you're in.
You're also vastly overestimating how much police and firefighters make. You're looking at the outlier figures and acting as if it's the norm.
Basically you depend on the local government to make good financial decisions (the fact that your pension is so high might be a counter-signal to that).
If you work in top tech companies and save enough, possibly with the option to relocate to cheaper areas when retired, you can have more ensured returns from investing judiciously in bonds/stocks.
Should you trust your own responsibility to manage finances or the local government you work for?
I am not even going to waste my time making a rebuttal to your biased opinion.
So, using public money of the company to invest in these cities increase the value of their personal investments :)
It won't be changing anytime sooner.
Shareholders aren't bothered. I wouldn't be surprized if majority of shareholders by value live in these cities too.
But I remember reading that after WW2 a lot of US companies were expanding and looking for new headquarters. They'd commission huge research teams to find the best location for the new headquarters, spend a lot of time and effort to find a good place.
A book written about 10 or 15 years after many of these companies found that almost invariably the result of the research placed the best location within a short distance of where the CEO was from/currently lived.
So what you're saying doesn't really surprise me :)
Via https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/28/20030328/
I found this HBR article: https://hbr.org/1989/03/corporate-architecture-from-the-outs...
Which has this quote:
> A dozen years ago, William Whyte, author of the classic book The Organization Man, tried to do just that. The sociologist took his map and phone book and set out to chart which corporate headquarters had gone where and why. Contrary to official rationales, which emphasized corporate enhancement or a disinterested pursuit of the great outdoors, Whyte found that most of the new campus compounds were sited within eight or nine miles of the CEO’s home—a chilling and widely broadcast statistic that jarred with corporate claims about humane treatment for those uprooted in the move.
My kids go to PS11, which is excellent, just a few blocks from Google HQ (I don’t work at Goog) with some real diversity in the classroom, literally kids of all possible colors from around the world. Interestingly, none of the other parents I know work at Google. I wouldn’t mind if that number ... doubled.
Right now we’re looking at middle schools and I am pleased to say the options in district 2 are fantastic, again.
Pardon me if I misunderstand, but isn't double "none" still none?
http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-business/ci_31319589/goog...
https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/news/2014/02/03/googl...
Here's a story published earlier this year,
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/google-early-pioneer-pittsburg...
Of course, they're also expensive cities: Zurich is one of the most expensive in Europe, and Munich is the most expensive city in Germany.
Now, maybe this is because the Google executive team loves throwing away money on the most expensive cities for no reason. But I think a more likely explanation is that the same desirability that drives up prices also makes it more attractive for talent and employers.
My understanding is that at least part of the appeal of NY to Google and Amazon is the quality and quantity of systems engineers at banks and hedge funds.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-15/lloyd-... (among many other such articles)
About 6 months later, two others also left for tech. I talked with a friend still at GS, and banks are at least making token moves now to be more attractive- "casual fridays", ping pong table on the floor, etc. Not real change, but it at least shows they are somewhat concerned.