Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

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It really depends on what you want to do. If programming is programming and programming is just a job, then you can do that anywhere there are programming jobs, and with so many companies offering remote work, that could be anywhere.

But if programming is what you intend to bring as a founder - if it's simply a means to get the burning ideas out of your head and into a product, then there's a much smaller number of places where that will work: San Francisco, Seattle, New York. You need to be able to have coffee with a VC, meet with multiple co-founder options, do a tech meetup and also spend a sizable chunk of the day coding.

If you live near a small city, working that way is an impossibility. You'd have to go to the nearest big city to find that type of collaboration, and the trip will burn through all your coding time, and you still won't have the kind of quality selection that you'd get in NY or SF.

As you say, hacking the rent-salary ratio, which is what the article is about, should be a much smaller factor in how you decide where to live.

What if I'm working on a side project, don't want VC funding (or any sort of loans), and just want to build organically? I can find people who can program and can program well in almost any place on the planet. There are a shitload of Russians and Chinese cleaning up at things in the software engineering domain. There are a shitload of people writing all kinds of good and bad code everywhere. Even if I wanted to found a startup in Nowhere, Saskatchewan I could, particularly since there are plenty of folks who will work remotely and maybe a few locals who are good as well.

San Francisco is a place. Engineering talent is available everywhere, though perhaps most places it isn't so much fish jumping onto the line as in the Bay Area.

What about all the nerds who are Polish, Portuguese, and Peruvian and choose to remain local because their spouses, children, and other interests are? They can still code, some of them are definitely brilliant, and they can either work locally or (more likely) remotely.

Starting a "startup" with venture capital might be next to impossible in Peru, for all I know, but a hell of a lot of folks don't want to exit, don't want to dilute their ownership of their product, and frankly like the environs elsewhere.

If you can afford to pay a couple Chinese programmers this isn't a bad idea. You run the risk of your code just vanishing and a eerily similar Chinese product appearing a few months later, but depending on your financial situation you can be a sole funder in that case.

Not that I have anything against using out of country programmers, but it's a fact that China does not strongly enforce copyright and does not go out of its way to protect foreign businesses. I don't know about Russia, India, South America, etc, I'd be curious about anybody that's done this sort of thing before. Tim Ferris always talks about it for things like running his support and returns and whatnot.

You can just choose countries with Western culture that didn't have too much luck economy-wise in the recent years, but have stable states and law. That usually means Central/Eastern Europe: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and so on. Avoid Belarus, Ukraine and others with heavy eastern influences (a rule of thumb: if they use Latin alphabet, there's a good chance that it's safe).

I think to padobson's point, it's all about what you want to do.

There are certain restrictions that the Bay Area places on you, like how much money you need to earn, and a particular lifestyle you want to live, in a very specific industry. This is the same as someone going to Houston for Oil, NYC for Finance/Fashion, LA for entertainment, etc. People who live in those places have a particular set of goals - e.g. building big companies (vc or not), doing well on wall street, hitting it big in the movies, etc.

If you don't have those goals, then absolutely - stay where you want to stay. Work remotely. There is a ton of arbitrage in software dev right now, you can make a killing and live in really cheap places. You can literally live like a king. if that is what you want to do.

So it all comes down to your goals, and the Bay Area as a whole is self selecting in that way. If you want to do something more chill in software, that's great. We need more people making money writing code - it's great for the world economy. But you don't need to be in the Bay Area for this (unless you want to).

> you need to be able to have coffee with a VC

If you are building a company that needs VC funding. Most companies don't.

"Venture Capital is the wrong source of capital for the vast majority of entrepreneurial ventures" http://avc.com/2005/03/dont_take_the_m/

If you aren't looking to raise VC but instead want to be part of a vibrant tech ecosystem, well, that opens up more mid tier cities. For starters: San Diego, LA, Boulder, Austin, Portland, Pittsburgh(?) in the USA.

Adding one: if you're doing anything security related, DC's your friend.

Good point!

And if you are into oil/gas, Houston. Marijuana, Colorado or Washington. Cars, Detroit (maybe?). Commodities, Chicago. Ag, Kansas City (maybe?). Outdoor experiences, SLC. Building something for Latin America, Miami. Ets, etc.

I imagine there are many other cities that dominate in niches that I'm missing.

St. Louis tends to be one of the best cities for Ag stuff.

For the ignorant, what's AG? Google isn't helping.

Agriculture.

Someone should tell Google (hey googlers on here) to add that case to the search engine's special cases, as in: "Did you mean agriculture or (the chemical symbol for) silver [1] or ..." :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver

I live in the Detroit suburbs. Can confirm many programmers working for auto companies around here and friends with a few.

I've been far happier as an engineer in NYC and Berlin than SF. Gentrification has made SF a pretty boring place to be, and I felt that my overall sense of creativity plummeted there when I was surrounded by so few people from different backgrounds.

Agreed. I ended up moving across the bay and living in Berkeley while working in SF just for that reason.

It's kinda funny though, as people in Berlin at least (I'm sure in NYC too) are constantly complaining about gentrification too :)

I don't think there's nearly as much gentrification as people say there is, overall. I mean sure, there's a huge amount of gentrification in the 20% of SF that is not rent controlled: there only the super rich can live.

But, as for the other 80% that's rent controlled, lots of it is pretty dilapidated, almost borderline 3rd world country in some parts. 1% (7k people) of the SF population is homeless and even more are nearly there (despite over 240 million$ a year spent fighting homelessness).

Perhaps the reason people find SF boring is due to the hollowing out of the middle class.

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