I just want to get a general feeling of how much people on HN value the freedom to work from wherever they want.
I consider working in Vancouver to be $15k/year preferable to working elsewhere in Canada.
I consider working from home to be $40k/year preferable to working from an office.
If I spent 5 years living in the bay area, that $20k/year would drop significantly, since I would no longer need to learn those quotidian details.
Perhaps I should have said that I consider Canada to be $5k/year preferable to silicon valley, plus $15k/year as a frictional cost of changing countries.
In terms of $/hour, $80k/year for an 8 hour work day isn't much worse than $120k/year for an 8 hour work day plus a 1 hour commute in each direction. And I think best when there aren't other people around.
However, commuting is expensive[2] and, more importantly to someone with significant introversion, interacting so closely with people in person all day is mentally exhausting.
To me, that's about $10/hr. I don't place much value in having the freedom to live anywhere I want, since I already do. The added freedom to travel is appealing but heavily moderated by the need to ensure a suitable workspace with reliable, high-enough bandwidth connectivity wherever I go.
[1] Finds value in the structure and face-to-face communication
[2] Especially if one includes time. A 45-mile one-way driving commute would need about $10k/yr in salary to offset the after-tax out-of-pocket expenses. If that's from the South Bay to San Francisco, it's an hour each way, adding 23.5% to the time away from home (assuming a half hour lunch). Caltrain is a bit better, but, unless one lives and works at a station, it will cost more than just the $2500/yr in monthly tickets. One can work on the train, but there's still at least 15-30 minutes at each end getting between home/work and the train seat, at best a 12% savings in workday length.
If I had to live elsewhere, it would depend on the cost of living. In SE Asia for example, I would give up 60% or more. In Europe, I would give up only 20-40%.
If your company uses (or could use) offshore workers, you could have a good case for moving overseas to manage that team. The value of having someone they trust working alongside the offshore team is probably worth paying you your current salary.
Could developers in those places end up pricing themselves out just due to location?
Realistically, for most people absolute freedom to work where they want probably means leaving their existing job and having much more restricted choice of jobs or companies looking to contract out, which unless you're presently underpaid will probably to lead to lower offers .
$80k in the Valley or in NY is barely enough to live, The same 80k is O.K. in Texas and is great in most capitals in S. America..
Besides, some of us actually like going to the office ;)