Hacker News Reader

Comment by notadoc | Hacker News Reader

A related thought...

Startups and tech companies should pick a few midwestern or NE cities and open offices there.

Imagine if Cleveland Ohio was a tech hub and "cool" by any vague stretch that a western city is, housing there is practically free by west coast standards.

https://www.zillow.com/homes/cleveland-ohio_rb/

Even cities like Albany or Rochester NY are dirt cheap compared to any city in a western state.

https://www.zillow.com/albany-ny/

But instead everyone piles into San Francisco, bay area, Seattle, Portland, LA, and overpays by small fortunes.

View on HN

I left my home country to work in the bay area largely because I was going to a well established company in an area dense with other work. The chance of me moving to the middle of nowhere for a startup is exactly zero.

Yes, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. If there were plenty of good tech job opportunities in Nowheresville, USA, tech people would move there. If there were more tech people in Nowheresville, USA, companies would move there. Who has to act first to bootstrap the next tech hub?

Same one that bootstrapped Silicon Valley. The government.

Indirectly!

Google, Facebook, and Amazon? Many of my friends believe that Google's new Austin office might lead to other tech companies to move here, but that's just speculation.

Yawn, It will be a cold day in hell, when Austin has more tech jobs than Dallas or Houston.

But then you have to live in Dallas or Houston.

Have you been to either? Texas is quite nice, and has great weather.

Cost of living is a small fraction compared to the bay area or west coast cities too.

>Texas is quite nice, and has great weather.

No, it doesn't. It's hot. And the people are conservative; nothing nice about that.

Yes, I live in Austin. It's quite nice comparatively. :)

You mean like IBM, Intel, Oracle, Dell, Facebook, Apple, Dell, VMWare, Rackspace, PayPal, Indeed, etc. etc.?

The Cleveland metro area is ~2 million people.

Granted it is going to have less tech jobs, but it isn't really the middle of nowhere.

It IS the middle of nowhere when you're talking about tech jobs. How many people live in the city is irrelevant if they don't have jobs for you there.

I once made a comfortable living as a Software Engineer in Cleveland metro, they do have Progressive insurance, bunch of banks like National City, Key Bank (which may have now been acquired).

The comments coming out people who very likely are Bay Area residents are the most ignorant as well as close-minded. Unless you are killing it in R&D departments of Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft etc. There is some one doing a similar job you are doing in 10 other metros in 'Murica.

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on your specialty. I do embedded programming, and there's a bunch of metro areas where there just isn't much work for me; NYC is one of these. There's tons of software work there, but it's all finance or web, and very very little embedded. But there's other places, which are not traditional tech hubs, where there is some work for me where I'd rather not work, such as Detroit.

What specifically about Detroit makes you not want to live there?

disclaimer: detroit resident

Brutal winters and high crime rate, what else? Of course, there's lots of other problems like decrepit infrastructure (like the water pipes in Flint nearby), and I seriously doubt there's any kind of nice downtown area to walk around in like in nicer cities. I hear the suburbs are OK, but that doesn't exactly make me want to live someplace.

Basically, AFAICT, Detroit sounds like someplace that would be OK if all you wanted was to live in the suburbs and never leave your house, and you have zero interest in outdoor activities, and don't care about going to nice restaurants downtown. The crime downtown is terrible, there's huge stretches of abandoned neighborhoods, the winters are horribly cold; I honestly don't know why anyone would want to live there. The location surely made sense a century ago back when shipping on the Great Lakes was a big thing and the location was sensible for manufacturing and shipping reasons, but those reasons are all gone now.

so youve never been to detroit and are going on what you hear from the media - got it. Just wondering if you had any real reasons

Those are real reasons. If you think I'm going to spend several years visiting every city in America over 250k people so I can see what it's "really like" instead of just reading about it, then you're absolutely insane. If Detroit can't fix its image in the media, that's its problem, not mine.

Moreover, why the hell should I believe some anonymous troll on HN over plenty of journalistic articles?

True.

But for some American born engineer who has family outside of SF/NY/LA, being able to work remote while staying near family/hometown would be awesome for himself, the hometown and ultimately residents of those mega cities too as they would see some relief in ever increasing cost of living.

Google/Facebook/etc have to pay a lot higher salary to keep talented engineers in/near SF because of much higher cost of living.

Those employers probably COULD save $ if they paid lower salary and allowed full remote working. Even if they flew in the engineers on chartered jet every other week and housed them in hotel for regular face-2-face time in HQ, they still probably would end up saving $ in the end. Like instead of paying salary of half a million a year, they could pay $300,000 and use the $200,000 for chartered jets and housing when they are visiting SF.

The vast majority of people in SV don't make 500k. 200-300 puts you in the upper middle even in tech.

tech companies open up offices in cities to hire existing talent in those communities. they don't open up offices to take talent away from their existing offices, at great expense to the company with no measurable upside.

Perhaps not surprisingly the two things a region can do to boost its economic vitality is to put in an airport and Internet infrastructure. I'm still waiting on the citylab report comparing similar economic zones with Google Fiber and those without.

The Internet so that you can work remotely, and a easy to use airport when you can't work remotely.

Network effects -> high cost of living.

I've never been to Cleveland, Ohio, but most of these flyer states in America where housing is cheap are boring. Add to that the chicken-and-egg problem, you're going to have a tough time convincing young single people to move there.

Only practical solution to avoid high cost of living is to embrace remote work and give employees the freedom to work from wherever they want.

Having grown up near Cleveland, I'll take the weather of San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, LA over that of Cleveland.

The weather is what keeps me in the SF Bay Area despite the traffic congestion and high cost of living. Being able to bike to work nearly every day of the year goes a long way toward making up for heavy traffic.

Weather in SF and LA is likable, but Seattle and Portland are dreadfully rain soaked and socked in clouds for 9 months of the year. You don't move to the latter two locations for the weather, you move there because they are considered trendy and "cool" in modern culture and you're a trend seeker. The same "cool" designation could be slapped onto Cleveland or Milwaukie or Ann Arbor and you'd have the same trend seekers piling into there too.

rain is a lot easier to deal with than snow and ice on the roads. i'd take 9 months of cloudy skies over 4 months of invisible black ice patches, multi car pileups, blizzards, polar vortexes, scraping ice off my car every morning, shovelling my driveway, extreme heating costs, etc.

While the PNW isnt ideal compared to drought ridden california, its vastly nicer weather than what millions of americans put up with every year.

Biking in drizzle isn't hard or all that dangerous, and if it's not drizzling too much is pretty fun (it keeps you cool).

Biking in sub-freezing weather and snow is entirely different.

Does Cleveland even have any bike lanes?

Interesting how you call people who seek practical, comfortable weather "trend seekers", and you seem to think that enduring brutal winters is normal.

Part of being cool is also the cachet of living somewhere "exclusive". If a place is considered cool, then the demand to live there should increase by definition, and therefore prices will rise.

Also, the weather is noticeably nicer, plus you're in a city with an international airport hub.

"plus you're in a city with an international airport hub."

>pays an extra $30,000 a year to live near SFO

>saves $50 on a flight to Asia once a year

rationale checks out

It works for the CEOs who make the decision.

Living near a major airport gives them a lower chance of seat upgrades, though. Nobody in ATL ever gets Delta 360.

If you like to travel and fly a few times a year, being near a major airport may not be justifiable financially but removes so many pain points from the process. I definitely travel more than I would if it was more difficult.

I grew up in a small town far from any airport and traveled internationally regularly. We either drove 50 miles to a small regional airport, which meant we'd have layovers and connections flying almost anywhere (more chances for lost luggage!), or we drove three+ hours to a big airport with expensive parking. Landing after a long international flight and having to get in the car and drive for three hours is a terrible way to end a trip.

These days I live within a 30 minute cab ride of LGA or JFK. The availability of flights and the ease of getting to and from the airport makes a huge difference in how annoying it is to fly. Cheap early morning flights don't require pulling an all nighter, there are direct flights to so many cities, and the wheels-down-to-hot-shower-and-beer-at-home time is so short.

A two-bedroom condo for less than $100k, period? You can pay off the mortgage with a couple years of income, free and clear?

Now I see why my parents like living in Albany!

I think Microsoft did this with Redmond?

It's not very far from Seattle (which had aerospace and such when Microsoft was starting).

the basic problem, once you put aside mythology and the realities of VCs tending to fund local companies, as summarized by a friend who picked up and did a funded startup in Austin:

1. top tech talent in austin is rare and they know they are rare 2. because of (1) they can always work remotely for big valley companies (e.g., the top ten by average eng salary) 3. so if they are working locally, you are mostly going to give the top guys valley-like comp 4. the rest of the talent is cheaper

... which doesn't sound too bad, as far as it goes. But then you run into an issue. There's going to be some specific skill that you need and you simply are not going to be able to hire it locally. So now you're in the position of hiring a remote worker or trying to get someone to move. Depending on your team, your product, team communications skills, how important in-person vs. remote is, etc. to the company, real or imagined, this can basically screw things up.

"There's going to be some specific skill that you need and you simply are not going to be able to hire it locally."

Such as?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com