Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations
blog.whoishiring.io
blog.whoishiring.io
If the cost of beef was increased 4x for whatever reason, then most people would just switch their preference for meat.
There are ofcourse a lot of greedy companies.
But a lot of the time the consumer demands a price point for software product, many startups cannot afford to pay 400K to developers.
I think its not a reflection of how difficult it might be to create software but stagnant wages for the average person.
Secondly, only the technology industry has a massive pipeline of overseas workers available...so naturally there is constantly a "shortage" as a means to increase the pipeline of overseas workers.
I'm not saying NOT to hire overseas workers. I'm saying to be honest about it. Say -- we refuse to pay market wages and would rather that new graduates not find work than pay them a living wage for the Bay Area, instead we'll hire offshore workers desperate to flee their countries and willing to shack up 3 to a studio apartment.
So then the talk turns to bringing in H1Bs who will work for the low end of the "prevailing" (Ha!) salary.
Why don't these companies cut to the chase and just open an office in India? Or have the entire operation there?
Or are some of them actually not trying to change the world by delivering better toast to your door, and they just want to live in the Bay Area?
This is untrue in my experience as the equivalent in an office environment to hiring an illegal immigrant would be subcontracting a 'job' to either a staffing agency whose H1B employees get paid piecemeal and billed out for different amounts. I've also worked with independent contractors who if you added up their low pay on the level, wouldn't be making adequate pay.
Heck, I've worked contract jobs through staffing agencies trying to make end meets and had the job location charge for parking which would be reimbursed 3 months later. Good luck getting ur money if you are working the next job and can't afford the time to follow up for that check.
There are plenty of ways companies dance around the same entity of illegal immigrant wages.
Why is silicon valley more expensive to rent in? Because people came with money and the banks agreed to loan at a multiple of the new wage ceiling.
If wages increase x4 guess what will happen?
We need to stop banks creating debt to issue against land otherwise it will always absorb all income. And therefore all productivity gains flow to the land owner.
Come on, let's hear how rents are not tied to wages in a thread about remote working providing higher wages than the local area but lower wages than the hot-spot.
Let's hear it HN.
Because supply and demand. High salaries attract a lot of people to the bay and communities systematically refuse to build new housing to meet the demand so the price goes up.
You can do whatever you want to the banks but that won't change the fundamental of 2X people trying to live in X houses.
Credit also typically increases ahead of wages which squeezes people further.
This isn't supply of people vs supply of homes, this is supply of credit. If you neutralise this you will see prices fall and be paying less of your labour to banks.
2008 - the credit taps ran dry => huge crash. Before that near unlimited credit saw land prices increase hugely. Neither on the up or the down did we see wages have such volatility.
We shouldn't worry about "squeezing" people out. Ours is a HUGE nation. We have A LOT of natural resources and there is no reason why we can't let people build more (outside of protected areas, of course).
People who are "priced out" should move to places where rent costs less. I keep hearing about property owners having enough political clout to block further development, depressing supply. They placate existing residents with tiny portions of rent-controlled apartments.
I fail to see how "gentrification" is a problem at all in the bigger scheme of things.
I don't think people renting out more places is a problem. If landlords hold supply out of the market to prop up prices, we can discourage such actions with a more dynamic property tax that places a realistic tax burden on under occupied or unoccupied property.
All that being said, we definitely need to figure out some way to peoperly educate people about personal finance.
https://www.amazon.com/Progress-Poverty-Industrial-Depressio...
I agree to some extent. Property (land) taxes have to be high enough to discourage people from leaving it unused. I have no problems with fully replacing personal income tax but I'm not an expert and I have no idea if we can realistically raise the same tax revenue from land tax alone.
It is a huge nation, but one where 70% of the tech jobs are stuck in SF/SV. I can move to Lincoln Nebraska and pay $400/mo in rent, but I sure as heck wont find an employer seeking a python job.
[1] http://python.jobs.net/jobs/lincoln,nebraska.aspx
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/python-jobs-lincoln-ne
[3] http://www.indeed.com/q-Python-Developer-l-Nebraska-jobs.htm...
Software gets written in a lot of places.
1. banks creating near unlimited credit against land which at best eclipses productivity gains leaving workers no better off and rentiers collecting all the gains
2. the rest of the population working out that the game is rigged and piling into real-estate speculation as the only game in town.
I'd have expected someone in a country with a crippling house price bubble in many cities to get this.
Bay area is infamous for many housing supply constraints in regulations. As far as loans increasing the demand side, banks can be pretty strict with %20 down payment restrictions. Which is why once houses go out of the dual income high earner price range ($1-1.5 million), you start seeing it overflow to other less desirable regions in the bay area.
it has not happened yet but it is certainly pricing many out at lower ends of the income scale.
It's very naive to think that this is simply any one factor, especially supply and demand alone.
Why are economics conversations so limited?
The best way to avoid speculative run ups in prices (and subsequent crashes) is effective taxation. Of course taxation of land is not popular with the rich and powerful as it can’t be avoid.
It amazes me on HN where on most other complex behavioural problems if someone came along and shouted "it's because of X" they would be laughed out to cries of "it's more complicated than just one thing".
Yet when it comes to millions of people with varying priorities interacting with government and the banks anyone who comes up with anything more complex than "it's supply and demand" is told "no, I've done econ 101 thank you".
Hacker news can't be bothered with Georgism, they've done econ 101 syllabus (provided by their establishment).
https://www.amazon.com/Progress-Poverty-Industrial-Depressio...
Personally I do think it is a good idea to try and avoid speculative bubbles in assets and the best way to do this is via taxation.
Credit however is not constrained except by a willingness to borrow and on the up this is near-unlimited. Fortunes are made not by doing but by speculating and then at the end the workers pick up the tab.
Then hire remote devs. Or move your startup to a more affordable location.
If you need to have developers work onsite, and you need to be in the Bay Area, then you need to pay accordingly.
It's a good point, but I wouldn't expect a construction company that could only pay 20% of cost to hire cranes to complete many buildings.
So maybe startups in that bracket just aren't viable under their current models. Maybe they need to rethink their salary/equity mix to make up for lack of cash.
[0] And even for lower-paying specialties (like UI/UX), 400k isn't even 2x market rate.
(For the curious, I opted for tremendous work-life balance instead)
Bay area engineers like to pretend that there are no people of their calibre elsewhere in the world, but that is just flat out wrong.
Beyond a certain level of salary, salary stops varying too much by cost of living or geography. If I make well over 200K per year in a major city, I'm going to expect someone else to pay me 200K/yr at least no matter where I live.
I wouldn't even try to get other job offers to negotiate you on it -- I'll just simply believe you're not meritorcratic and flat out reject your offer and view your company skeptically from then on. Low-balling an exceptional engineer over geography is dysfunctional in the same way as working really hard to hire a senior, experienced engineer and then telling them "2 weeks vacation is the standard for all new hires.." or something. It's just a big red flag.
I've worked in quant finance before too and the trouble there is that pay is more political. Firm sizes are smaller and the people with political power extract a bunch of rent, then leave a comparatively tiny bonus pool for all of the low level workers. It takes years of soul crushing political games to get up into that stratosphere of much higher bonuses. On the bottom, the firms will also hassle you hard during negotiations to try to ratchet down your base wage too, and make lots of unverifiable promises about how compensation will be made up out of bonuses. Whether this turns out true or not is largely a function of whose political darling you are. Ironically, as boring as the work is, this happens far less in rank and file companies.
I think there are so many confounding variables that it's not useful to draw sweeping conclusions about this. Sometimes big box corporate type companies will pay huge wages for someone who just maintains something that is not a revenue powerhouse at all. Sometimes firms will restructure to have fancy new divisions that "are like a start-up inside of an established company" (ugh) and they'll hammer down on only hiring young, inexperienced workers on cheap wages in a shiny new urban office who will work a ton of hours. It varies basically as much as the hyper local political circumstances of the teams vary.
The bay area gets a lot of attention because it's the software capital of the world, and software has these crazy gross margins and rapid life cycles that allow companies to be born, experience explosive growth, make insane profits, (potentially) suffer radical declines, leading to a quick boom or bust. Software companies make great news stories, so the bay area gets a lot of attention, and many talented people who aren't sure where to go decide to move there.
I live there now and work out of coworking spaces where I've met a number of startup founders. Many of them are self-proclaimed visionaries hyped up by VR and AR or IoT. Few of them are as smart as my friends who are getting their Masters and PhD degrees at Duke, Wash U, or Case Western. The most impressive startup I saw in the last year was being made by a self-taught programmer/entrepreneur building his own company out of Colorado Springs.
Beyond just my anecdotal evidence, where do MIT and Harvard graduates go? Where do Georgia Tech, Rice U, John's Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon graduates go? Silicon Valley doesn't take all of their students nor just the top in their class. Some people move to DC, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Austin, NYC, or Denver because they have family or friends there, or because the kind of work in these other cities is more appealing than The Bay.
Apologies for the rant. I realized after writing it that your 'Not really' comment was probably in response to the parent's assertion that companies should hire from outside the bay area, while I took it as 'Not really' in that there are no engineers of the same calibre outside SV.
Regardless, the amount of hubris and hype over the Bay Area is staggering when there are so many equally talented engineers all over the US.
I agree about the hubris. And for as much hubris as there is about the coveted "SV developer" it's at least 10x worse hubris regarding the coveted SV startup as employment destination.
Seriously, I work for a US company in Europe, and am massively surprised (and disconcerted) by the fixation on where someone went to school.
We had an awesome candidate a few months back, did 4 interviews with us, aced them all, and one of the final interviewers (US-based) was obsessed with where they got their university education, whereas I don't think anyone else had even noticed it (being more focused on their skills).
Turns out she'd gone to Oxford though, so it was all good :/
Effects like this snowball. So once a school is known for producing graduates that others are desperate to affiliate with in a certain field, like say art or law, then impressive people from other fields may be drawn to work there, like an excellent professor of computer science who thereby actually does elevate the level of education granted to computer science graduates, making graduates into the sorts of people that tech companies want to get on-paper for acqui-hires because acquirers will want to affiliate with them.
One general trend I see in humanity is that the more that we advance a sort of scientific and rational understanding of the world -- something that should supplant most of these systems of credential -- the more that human politics is used to build Dutch book-like circumstances in which, no matter what the outcome, impressive-seeming-ness and competition to affiliate with "fancy" people will continue to be the dominant manner of achieving wealth and autonomy.
To be clear, even though I attended an Ivy school, I find this lamentable. I did not enjoy my time there and feel basically how Mike Reiss feels. But at the same time, I also see all the banter on Hacker News about how the degree doesn't matter and I just roll my eyes. What is it that people think? That something like HackerRank or TripleByte are going to democratize tech hiring? Please. They will be (and already are being) used as just additional tools in the political toolbox to allow people to make up whatever arbitrary standards they desire for the sake of favoring candidates based on political reasons.
Then hire them either remotely or open an office at a place where the living expenses are much cheaper (but the latter also costs money for the company which it could also spend in salaries). Where is the problem?
I want to buy a BMW M3, but I will only pay $5,000. I can't find any, therefore there is a shortage of BMWs??
Then comes kids...
If you're willing to share you can get for cheaper. If you want 1 bedroom you're going to struggle to find something for $3k.
From what I have seen the salary spread between say SF and NYC is not enough to compensate for the higher rental costs in SF.
Good luck with burning out at 35 with no passive income streams. I'd rather build equity, and even have a couple of rental properties from being a top 10% earner in a smaller area. That's a million dollar piggy bank being filled by someone else AND a passive income stream on which to retire.
Americans tend to believe they are wealthier than anyone else. Not so! Apart of the fact several countries in Europe have higher salaries (and cost of living than the US) there's the fact major cities are much more expensive than smaller ones, even in poorer countries.
Case in point: The most expensive cities in the Americas are Sao Paulo, Bogota and New York. You can easily enjoy a higher standard of living earning $70k in most of the US than you can in Sao Paulo or Bogota (I've lived in both, I know it for a fact)
$70k in Sao Paulo doesn't go much further than $70k in New York (or Tokyo, London, Paris, Singapore...)
Do I have to remind you how much a computer, a smartphone or a car costs in Brazil compared to the US?
I doubt your claim of finding "good enough" developers for $35k. I was making more than that in my first job, fresh out of school, when I had zero real world experience, working remotely for an American company, and that was in the early 2000s.
Most companies would be elated to find even a competent html/css/js coder for that price.
About the $35k claim, let's make the math: currently USD 35k ~= BRL 115k. 115k/12 ~= 9.6k. That means USD 35k/year is roughly BRL 9.6k/month, which is the salary of a Senior Java guy here. Idk about 2000, but it seems like you were doing very good back then.
Most software developers, as most people, in South America simply cannot afford the standard of living of a first world country, even when they make a great salary for local standards. Most things don't cost any less just because the local population cannot afford it (and very often they cost more).
You're comparing local salaries with remote salaries. It's very different, 95% of local guys are unemployable remotely due to a combination of lack of language skills (huge factor), low skill level, shitty work ethics (another huge factor) and being stuck in dead-end technologies like Java.
When American companies look for remote developers they want people who speak excellent/perfect English, are in the same time zone, have (at least) above average skills and are willing to work like Americans do (Americans are workaholics, you'll be surprised at how damn lazy/unproductive most people are). I've been working remotely for 10+ years and I've been asked to find local talent several times, and finding it is hard. I've only vouched for one guy in all this time, and he quit after 6 months and moved to the US (and the pay was spectacular for local standards).
Just to reiterate this, I know many people who would become developers if they could make $400k. These are smart people with strong technical skills.
And on the other hand: Can they afford these wages? I would guess that many companies would have trouble justifying that salary on a broad level.
It's not like engineers prefer living on social welfare to an underpaid engineering job.
Seriously... why should a smaller house cost nearly 10x more in the same country? You won't be paid 10x less where the cheaper houses are.
https://www.fortworth.com/about/neighborhoods-districts/cult...
Soon Fort Worth will over take San Fransisco in population, and at the last recession was far less disrupted economically. Speaking purely from data and statistics Fort Worth is more diverse than San Fransisco with regards to ethnicity, religion, nationality, and so forth. And I doubt there is a substantial difference in the diversity of food options since I have been to San Fransisco. The weather and public transit are likely superior though.
Otherwise, if I were single and had 10x the income I would likely agree that the bay area is a more fun place to be.
That being said, a lot of companies are abusing H1B and the system needs a huge overhaul so that the people who want to come work here can, the people who want to hire foreign works can, and we don't have a few companies using imported workers as indentured servants.
So yes, $300k for a mid-career position is clearly not enough in the Bay Area. Could you raise a family in a 1BR, yes you can! But there is a "shortage" of people who want to raise a family in a 1BR. There is no magic here -- pay would need to be commensurate to experience + cost of living or people simply will not take the job.
$300K pre tax. Tax rate of 40% $180K after taxes High Quality Child Care for 2 Children = $6K per month or $72K / year
108K after childcare
3Br house in SF - http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/hhh?search_distance=4&pos...
Call it $6K / month or $72K per year
$36K left after housing + Childcare + taxes.
$3K / month for transportation, food, clothing, vacations. Good luck...
You also just kinda snuck in a random 72k/year for something that was never discussed.
How about a spouse who also works? Would likely cover that 72k right there. 300k was a single person's income in the context above.
How about public school? How about just not sending them to the most expensive private schools possible?
You can pay that much for elite child care in places that aren't the Bay Area. The Bay Area probably has more people that are price-insensitive enough to imagine that the kind of places that charge that much are a reasonable minimum for "high-quality" child care, though, but that's more a difference in incomes than costs.
http://www.efile.com/tax-service/tax-calculator/tax-brackets...
California also has the highest State to Federal tax ratio which is around ~ 10% for what you describe. So your number are way off.
http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/state-taxes-california...
Unlikely. I mean, with absolutely no deductions, credits, or exemptions at all, your combined state and federal income and payroll taxes at $300K would be about 44% -- assuming a single filer.
This would have the added bonus of increasing your usable talent pool both among residents/citizens as well as among remote/off-shore/foreign candidates.
1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s-solomon/the-myth-of-...
1. Mandatory all-hands meeting times
2. Banning popular communications platforms like Slack, Google Chat, Skype
3. Expectations of all workers to be present continuously for their timezone instead of letting workers self-organize
4. Performance and productivity metrics based around KPIs that do not actually measure productivity but presence
5. Incompetent IT Ops mostly staffed by cheap contractors to offset overpaying for terrible hardware and software from Cisco to ensure a complete inability to reliably utilize the corporate VPN.
This doesn't mean that you're incorrect though - most IT O&S winds up going to lowest-bidding contracting companies and offshored resources that are measured upon the dumbest KPIs ever that completely leave out whether users are actually happy with anything at all. In fact, most IT in the F500 seems to have given up on ever making users happy. I'd say the better measure would be tickets / user filed - if a user never files a ticket, they're not complaining.
What? Who would do this?
This isn't the worst I've heard by far though. A lot of places won't give developers even power user access to their own laptops so you need to request installation of every application you might ever want, including git, Cygwin, etc. Many places will not allow users to run VMs either (and will disable VT-x mode in BIOSes that are locked out).
Devonkim is right, remote work fails because people think it will work just like working on premises
Rather, you need your work on premises to work the same as remote.
- Communication is key: slack is good, but actual phone or video calls are needed (and face to face meetings sometimes - just so people know each other). But more importantly, nothing should depend on a face-to-face meeting. This requires people to actually stop being lazy and getting communications going
- Good infrastructure for code/testing, no "this is only available on site" kind of stuff
- Redundancy and fallbacks (what if the internet is down?)
- Clear information on the people to reach for anything you might need
I do agree it requires a certain know-how to make it work. It seems to me there's more of a shortage of knowledgeable managers than there is of able developers.
* Declining dominance of the Microsoft/Oracle hegemony in secondary markets
During the '90s Microsoft and Oracle were particularly effective at entering emerging markets and pushing their solutions to such a degree that "computer programmer" became synonymous with "Microsoft/Oracle developer". Thus, if you wanted to become a software developer in one of these markets, it meant learning C#/Java, along with all the ecosystem, tooling, and inevitably...lock-in.
Fast-forward 20 or so years, and the Open Source movement is finally beginning to crack that shell of lock-in. Anecdotally, when I first moved to Turkey 4 years ago, technology job sites almost exclusively listed C#/Java positions. Today, I know many Python, Ruby, Scala, Go, etc. developers living and working in Turkey, and there's been an explosion of related conferences, trainings, events, etc.
The one last hurdle I see that needs to be overcome in these places is the notion that developer education is as much a concern for those that employ developers as for the developers themselves. Pretty much all of the conferences/trainings have to be held over weekends because it is still difficult for developers to get time off during the week to attend. Once that bit of cultural shift happens, I only foresee this trend accelerating.
"High speed Internet." apart from that the tools (video calling, etc.) are also getting better.
BTW I think the rise of English is really interesting, I added that https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/commit/4bff...
We often hear alot about enlarging your net of potential talent (#1) and flexible work hours, but there's much more to it than that.
At this point, I can't imagine _not_ working remotely anymore. I'm just sooo much more productive and happy this way.
However, I noticed most of the remote locations were "US-only", and even the ones in other countries were usually local to that country -- "germany only", etc.
I was wondering how many of the "US-only" ones would accept me, since I am a US Citizen, just not living in the US. Or is there some kind of tax reason they have to be US-only?
Working with a distributed team across the world's time zones (f.ex. Bay Area and much of Europe are 9 hours apart) is an entirely different game from working with a distributed team in roughly the same time zone. The latter allows you to organise as a digital version of a colocated office, eg you can you standups, easily plan meetings without negotiating against half the team's evening plans.
The first makes most sense if you manage to be mostly meeting-less. That's more challenging in my book, but maybe also more rewarding - and not only for hiring reasons (after all, meetings easily become a waste of time).
Or, what are you referring to?
Also, if I pay a person through their company like a contractor for too long, the IRS comes down on me because they assume I'm trying to skirt tax laws (and rightly so, because that's basically what you're suggesting).
When I did sidework, the side gigs all 1099'd me.
On the other hand, I worked for a smaller company as a 1099 contractor and was billing up to 67% of my yearly income to them.
In both cases I set the rate and determined my time off.
I suspect a job listing that says "remote anywhere in the world as long as you set up your own corporate entity with a foreign registration in the United States" wouldn't work very well. :)
I can't speak for other countries, but in Australia this is far simpler than most people realise.
There's a range of companies that will do all that for you. They set up and operate the company, they do payroll & taxes, they handle insurance.
When I worked remotely for a US company, I was technically a contract employee of an Australian company that existed purely to handle the contact work. I paid them something like $1-$2 per hour (that I worked) to handle all of that, including indemnity insurance, etc.
The only hard part was that the people that handled it weren't set up to easily handle foreign currency, and I was being paid in (and invoicing in) USD.
Other than that it was easy - in fact it was even better than when I contracted to Australian companies because I didn't need to charge sales tax, so more money went in to my pocket.
I keep hearing that I should move, or should work remote, I always reply: "How?"
Because most countries only allow you to move into them if you get invited or is already wealthy.
Most remote jobs I see, no matter where I look (I don't look only on HN) are US-only, or local only.
Most jobs that accept foreigners, have written on them: "Must already have H1B or Greencard"
So what I am supposed to do?
People criticize me when I complain that my yearly income has been on average about 10.000 USD, and I have to expend 2000 USD to build an "average" computer (or 4000 USD if I do it with only 100% legal parts with all taxes paid), saying that I am "stupid" for not working remote or relocating. But I am yet to see someone offer me a solution.
Even people that could hire me directly, sometimes say to me: "Oh, I loved your work, I am sure you will find work! Of course, I can't hire you, because it is against my company policy."
I've been working since 2009, I have lots of projects done, plus a startup.
But most of this, is not legal, usually I had jobs pretending to be contracts (ie: it was a day job, but paid as if I was a contractor, highly illegal in my country, because the government consider this a way to avoid following labour laws... and it is exactly that), low-paying contracts that don't follow all laws correctly either, stuff paid off the books, and so on.
But I found noone, in any country, willing to hire me 100% legally with fair pay, either as employee or contractor. (I did got some offers for legal work, but the pay was always less than my student loans, and later the loans I made to pay student loans, so not worth it at all).
Other than that weak suggestion, I don't have anything to offer you except sympathy. Sorry to hear about your situation.
If they belong apart, then so do Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Lol. Good one!
There are 891 (out of 19409 with known location) job post from Cambridge, MA or Boston, MA. Which gives 4.59%.
For remote, the way Linux kernel or BSDs are being developed, one needs nothing but git, emacs and browser (well, in case of Linux also a working mail) and no management at all. How could, say, Amazon, even hypothetically switch to remote?
More seriously, there is no market for code - otherwise people would just pay per commit (passed all the tests) nice and easy. The problem is people with money doesn't need a mere good code, they need their positions, their bonuses, their status. They will pay you for filling a slot in the social hierarchy which supports them, not for your good code.
This is why, perhaps, remote works fine for "nonprofits", like FreeBSD, but for corporations it is still a heresy.
Again, there, it seems, is no demand for mere good quality code.
This, by the way, is connected with hiring. Almost no one hire for abilities, everyone is hiring for good school diplomas. (Which diploma Mike Pall has? Igor Sysoev was a college dropout).
If I am wrong, and there is a market for code - solved problem, pushed a commit, all tests passed, money transferred - please tell me, I would participate gladly.
This is absolutely true but remote workers can still be FTEs that extend a manager's umbrella of influence. So really, working remotely is orthogonal to managerial pyramids of power.
If anything, hiring remote workers may allow managers to get more employees working for them because they can get more bodies for the same amount of budget.
Then inevitably as you work on solving the problem you will (if, and only if, you know the business domain well enough) discover that the problem description needs refining as the code is refined.
If there was a market for code I would not participate since it takes me less time to just write the code than to write a spec you could use to deliver something good. Non-programmers cannot do that, but if they are in the people you wanted to avoid, they would likely make a spec that would create a mess, regardless of how good the code driving the mess is.
I don't see how remote vs not has anything to do with managers or not...how would you get the "orders for code" written in the pure-code marketplace?
The trick about open source is mainly that the programmers ARE the end-users too and very well able to understand the problem domain and also are often scratching their own itch. So the problem of making good problem descriptions and make the code match it disappears. That is much more important than remote vs non-remote.
Right now, I find that working with the remote people is fine when there is some separation between our work, like an API, and it is excellent when I can get work to pay for me to travel. But debugging or pair programming over a call, where we can only share one screen, is just painful.
If you were to project our current technical culture many years into the future, flying cars, free energy, clean water, etc., would we still have to herd ourselves into a central location every day so we can sit in a chair that is positioned next to a bunch of other people in order to accomplish the most basic communicative/collaborative tasks? With all that we've accomplished and all that we will accomplish, it seems to me that's not the way of the future, that's the way of the past.
TL;DR; It's not that remote work is easy, it's just that we smell of hypocrisy when we try to apply technology to every possible problem while rejecting it for our own.
Right now, my setup is: watch the loudest person's screenshare on my small screen (1080p) and do everything else on the main screen (4K). Git push to a WIP branch every few minutes. It makes for an interesting git history, for sure.
Any info would be helpful, thanks.
That aside, your indignation over the quoted remark is misplaced since the GP was presumably talking about foreign nationals. So you're conflating two different points and then getting all self righteous about it.
The simple reason being that the biggest IT/tech companies have invested heavily in land & buildings (think about how Apple and Facebook have built huge "campuses" - why they call the offices/building a campus, I don't know, but anyways ...) and they need to utilize those assets in order to avoid the "white elephant" problem.
Also, unlike "agile" software-development or on-demand hosting, they can't merely downscale their land & buildings as they would for their AWS clusters and they also can't sell these buildings, as they seem geared specifically towards the needs of their owners (it isn't just a regular old office-block).
So while some startups of the future will embrace a remote-first culture, the big tech companies and many other regular startups will continue along with the concept of a fixed-location and fixed-office well into the future.
1. You don't have enough data to warrant 5 significant digits in the percentages, and even if you did, is it really relevant?
2. The points in your plot are interpolated using some sort of spline, why? If the answer is: because it looks better than jagged edges, then you should probably remove the spline, because you're effectively adding extraneous information. On the other hand a linear trend line could be nice here.
(I'm an author)
Right. I agree. This why I put a disclaimer at the beginning of the post. Hacker News is just one source among many others.
What if there weren't any?
Time zones aren't always the problem, high-speed internet is often common, lots of IT jobs are location-agnostic.
It could have a serious impact on the job market - what is poor in USA is upper 1% income worldwide, so an ability to get a remote job at USA prices can make local jobs uncompetitive by huge factors.
What sort of effects would this have on the world? Or is it meaningless speculation anyway, since the legal restrictions aren't going away in any plausible futures?
Would a city like Beijing or Taipei be adequately represented here at all?
My best guess for China is: they have to have something similar, although obviously not in English. They have a huge market with limited reasons to cooperate with English-speaking Internet. Also, Chinese Internet is isolated you won't see many services that are available in US or EU.
Fun fact there was an attempt to implement (copy) whoishiring.io http://www.v2ex.com/t/213945# the reason they like it but no google maps in china.
(I'm an author of this blog post)
http://www.recode.net/2016/5/13/11592570/china-startup-tech-...
I wonder if China's tech startups would impact the data if they had a presence on HN. Kind of an interesting puzzle
...that post on HN Who's Hiring. Big difference (biased towards newer companies) compared the the Bay Area tech industry as a whole. For instance, I'd bet that Google (Mtn View) + Facebook have more job postings any given month than the whole HN Who's Hiring post. And that's not counting eBay, Cisco, Apple, LinkedIn, Tesla, etc etc etc.
It’s like, ‘Hey, where’re you from?’ ‘Me, I’m from San Francisco.’ ‘Oh really? Where in San Francisco?’ ‘Uhhh, outside San Francisco.’ ‘Where outside San Francisco?’ ‘Gilroy.’
Also, nearly every big city was already announced as next Silicon Valley by the press by now. The press is creating huge illusion here.
I have the same thing going on.
The recruiter spam has transcended LinkedIn too. It's mostly direct emails from recruiters. I wouldn't mind if the jobs were even slightly related to what I do. It's pretty clear I'm a designer and frontend dev, but I get spam for Java and PHP gigs all the time...
London is in Europe as much as it has ever been. Geographically, its status hasn't changed -- whether you consider the island off the coast of the European mainland part of Europe or not; politically, its still the capital of the UK, which -- despite having voted that its government should withdraw from the EU -- remains an EU member, and not even formally on the exit path yet.
Europe is a continent, the EU an organization.