On the other hand, they probably weren't exactly expecting this reaction. And I have a feeling they aren't gonna like this. Well played ex-Garmin team, well played.
Olathe is a much better place to raise children than San Francisco imo. Olathe is recognized as a pretty dope place; see http://www.olatheks.org/Council/Awards , notably "Money Magazine ranked Olathe as America's 11th Best Place to Live noting the city's growth and major employers."
I recognize that it's difficult to leave old friends and acquaintances, but it's also a great positive opportunity to make new, geographically-distributed networks. People relocate all the time. My family was brought to Kansas by a relocation from Florida and it was a very good thing for us, though of course when someone says "hey buddy why don't you come move to Kansas" it doesn't sound that attractive. Frankly, that's part of the reason it's important to go; these people have some prejudice against the place, but they haven't tried going there. It's a good place with just as many modern accouterments as any other. It's in one of the richest counties in the nation but has a pretty low cost of living. It is not the rural farm-town Kansas of lore.
Obviously some people have compelling personal reasons to stay in SF, and that's fine. But it's highly unlikely that all of them have such reasons, most are probably just Kansas haters. :(
It is not a tech hotspot, don't get me wrong there. But the question isn't "Does KC rival Silicon Valley for tech jobs", just "Does KC have work for me if I get laid off from Garmin". I would say yes.
I'm just not sure that H&R Block or Hallmark likes to build cool new products like Garmin Connect. One could technically get "a job that pays money" at any city in the USA, so why move out to Kansas?
Keep in mind that these people built Garmin Connect, and have little to do with Garmin-the-company other than being employed by Garmin & using software interfaces from Garmin devices. Garmin probably decided to create a team to build Garmin Connect in the valley because of the talent available there. I don't think it would have been as easy to create such a talented team in Kansas.
I also think you're downplaying the social problems to moving, particularly away from a place like the Bay area. Personally, I'd just bristle at being told by my company to move half a continent away.
As for myself, I couldn't do that. I moved twice when I was growing up, and I hated it. I'm a homebody. I need a psychological anchor. You may prefer the experience of new people and places, and I prefer having a constant home. It's just who I am. So while I understand where you're coming from, and your reasons for your preference are perfectly valid, in the end it's still just a preference. I wish you luck and happiness in your lifestyle. It's not for me, and apparently it's not for this team either.
And Olathe's claim to fame is not "a list in a magazine somewhere", that's distorting my point. I linked to a whole page of awards and emphasized the most recognizable. I used these awards, and that award specifically, to indicate to people that Olathe is a real modern place, not a podunk with four buildings like people seem to think when they hear "Kansas". I used them in conjunction with other anecdotes and data. You're distorting my argument to marginalize the place, again. I don't why there's so much disdain for not-California among people.
Some people like SF and that's fine. I don't want everyone from San Francisco to move to Olathe. But I don't like how there are just a handful of places that people consider "acceptable" and everything else is "flyover country". There is real life and existence, normal people, normal existence, normal cities with normal roads and normal stores, outside of California and New England. People disdainfully refer to everything else as "flyover country", and perhaps even refuse en masse to relocate to some place as humble as Kansas, surely not big enough to contain those people, and it's just really silly imo. There's nothing wrong with Olathe.
I'm all for people living where they want. I agree that Kansas isn't the right place for everyone. I am simply annoyed by the assumptions heretofore described, and that this group refuses to even give the place a try.
That attitude comes from a different era. That "most employees understand" thing came from a time when there was something called "Job Security" so people understood that in return for moving, they had a reasonably good chance at keeping their jobs.
In this day and age, where you live in an at-will employment world, I know of _nobody_ in the bay-area technology scene who would relocate to kansas from California. Can you imagine what would happen if you relocated to Kansas and then were laid off? Olathe doesn't even have a Craigslist entry. The closest entry I could find was Kansas City, and the Bay area has about 15x to 20x the number of job listings.
I'm in absolute love with Vancouver, British Columbia, and one day, if I'm very lucky, hope to return there, (I visit about 4-5 times a year, my heart really is in that city) - but I couldn't rationally relocate my career out of the valley.
There is a different between being a wonderful place to work, and a wonderful place to live.
Olathe is a suburb and is a part of the greater Kansas City metro. Kansas City is about twenty miles away.
Meanwhile, in Redwood City alone, within walking distance from my house, I can count about 20 companies who might reasonably employ me.
I'll agree there isn't as much competition, but, the high end positions are _very_ few and far between.
Also, it's great to have many "competitor" companies working within a few miles of each other. If you decided to leave a company like Playfish, all the competitor companies like Zynga, Rock You, and Playdom will want to snatch you up in a hurry.
Except that then we'd have to deal with taxes, and corrupt city government (ok, SF isn't much better in that regard), and paying a private security force so we don't get shot, and fixing up houses that are in worse-than-teardown condition. And when I just want to write software - it's probably not worth the hassle. Organizing a mass relocation can be a pretty big drag.
1. If you lose your job working for Megacorp, who else is willing to hire a senior software/hardware engineer in the state?
2. What kind of salary would you even get from the 1 or 2 tech companies in the area? These companies know they are the only shop in town and probably only pay $50-60K/yr. for senior level positions.
3. What type of quality of life are you going to have? Are there any artistic or cultural activities in the area?
If you can answer these questions positively, I say go for it. Personally, I'd rather live on either coast and make 6 figures than live in flyover country any day. If I want, I can work on the coast for 20 years and save enough money to live comfortably in flyover country the rest of my life.
But I do get the desire to live in a big city over a suburb. I've worked in a city for the last few years after growing up in a suburb, and waking up in the morning and walking through the energy of a city is just different than waking up, getting in your car, slogging through traffic to work, parking in a giant lot, and going into a corporate office park for the day. Just something like lunch is vastly different in a city vs. a suburb, and that kind of stuff matters.
Indeed, I have no doubt that there are lots of technically smart people working at Garmin....but what is it about this company where they seemingly rest on their laurels like, forever, and google can come in, and with their first iteration of a product, make them look like little schoolchidlren...what were they doing in the meantime if they were so smart.
And by the way, I have a very expensive Garmin product sitting upstairs on my shelf if you suggest I should actually try it out before I criticize. Despite the behind the scenes software being very impresive, the UI looks like something done by a community college student who was drinking heavilt and has a deadline to meet.
If you're a geek, you'll probably hate Olathe though. One good simple measurement is counting the number of nearby hackerspaces. The SF/Bay Area has no less than 5 hackerspaces within a 20 mile radius of each other. Olathe only has 1 which is in Kansas City.
So go Olathe! And go S.F. And hey... If you aren't in Toronto, Canada you're missing a third great opportunity ;-)
Olathe: where is the nearest mountain? Sorry, too flat.
Toronto: too cold, too flat.
“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful: http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html
Three blog posts I'd love to read (and one that I wouldn't): http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/10/three-blog-posts-id-love...
Assuming they would have kept their SF salaries - they would have felt like they got a pretty sweet raise. On the flip side, Kansas doesn't offer anywhere near the culture or available activities.
They way they choose to handle this was pretty cool though, good for them!
Nobody on the Garmin Connect team or here on Hacker News needs to give me a reason for not wanting to relocate here. In a way, the place where you want to live is a very personal thing. Different people have different reasons for what they do and they don't need to justify their choices to me, just as I feel no need to justify my choice to them.
That said, I definitely think there are people blindly saying "Kansas sucks" without having lived there or even traveled there. I sympathize with the Garmin Connect team, as I would not want my employer to try to force me to move anywhere. However, I also resent the attitude that they seem to have taken toward Kansas and the implication that no one would choose to live there. (I admit that perhaps I'm reading too far into it.) To me, it would be enough to say that Garmin asked them to move and they didn't want to.