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.
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.
Cost of living is a small fraction compared to the bay area or west coast cities too.
No, it doesn't. It's hot. And the people are conservative; nothing nice about that.
Granted it is going to have less tech jobs, but it isn't really the middle of nowhere.
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.
disclaimer: detroit resident
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.
Moreover, why the hell should I believe some anonymous troll on HN over plenty of journalistic articles?