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Though I understand that it likely seems rural, by US definitions you live in an urban area. Any area with over 50,000 people is urban, which Manhattan manages even before adding the 25,000 non-residents there most of the year.

The labeling system seems outdated. I live in an area that is rural, yet everyone in a 120 mile radius of me would say I lived in a city. A new classification of "rural city" seems necessary.

The pedantic version of rural America is dying a rather ugly death. There are still nice places in the Midwest, but the further away you are from a true city the bleaker it often becomes.

In the UK that would be a town. Nowhere near rural. My parents live in a village with less than 100 people living there. That's rural.

Though we do lack a word for village, it doesn't address the issues with urban/rural.

That said, a village with a hundred people doesn't guarantee rural, The City of London's 10,000 residents for example.

The city of london is only a part of a bigger city. A village with 100 people means that there's uninhabited space around that village.

It was an extreme example saying town size isn't the entire thing.

Many U.S. states have villages, towns, and cities legally defined. It varies by state. https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/GARM/Ch9GARM.pdf

Manhattan proper is an urban area but Frankfort and Wheaton both discussed in the article are within 45 miles of Manhattan. You dont have to go more than a few miles outside of Manhattan to be back in "Rural" areas.

Agreed on the further away from a true city comment, that is whats happening in Western KS.

> I'm working for a San Francisco YC alum tech company but living in one of the most affordable places in the US.

> It's beautiful out here and I wish more tech workers would consider the Midwest when they decide to leave the Bay Area.

I think you are confused to the core issue. Your situation is relatively difficult to sustain long term and I know of only 1 person (out of 20+) that tried it that have succeeded for 10+ years.

It is a bit anecdotal but, to me, it is pretty clear that the issue isn't "consideration" but "Remote work is genuinely offshored to cheaper IT resources in India/China/etc". Those of us who want US-level salaries find it extremely difficult to sustain a remote work situation indefinitely, particularly as they age into the 40s and 50s.

If I could be certain I'd hold down a job that pays 40% of what I make now, indefinitely, I'd have left the "Big City" 10+ years ago.

The truth is for "average" developers as we age, we get trapped between being "too expensive" (people start trying to negotiate you down except when the economy is at full employment) and the financial obligations a family represents.

To be honest, it is a large part of why LeanFIRE and FIRE communities are so popular with tech folks. Many of us want _out_ but the financial risks involved aren't practical unless we are wealthy enough to be effectively retired in a LCOL location. I doubt many (if any) of such people plan to actually stop writing code.

You should probably also keep in mind that "small town" Kansas (50k+, but not a major city) is not the same thing as "rural" Kansas (where there isn't 50k people in the county spread over a much larger land area than Manhattan, KS).

It depends on the team and the role. From Austin, I joined Twilio (employee #25ish) as the first developer evangelist not on a coast. Now I'm with Okta on the Product Team (almost 2 years) running the technical side of our API offerings. There hasn't been a local office for either during that entire time.

Demonstrate that you bring unique value to get your foot in the door, deliver on that value to stay in the game.

If you're just starting your career, it's going to be tough at best but if you have a track record and find the right team, it's possible.

Do you realize Austin isn't a small town? And that the experience you are expressing is in no way relevant to what I said or the person I responded too?

Your career in Austin is the exact opposite of what I want. It is the very definition of a "big city" career.

Yes, even though they are working remotely now, they still have a lot of bargaining power given to them by virtue of the many local opportunities available to them. Also, being near a lot of developers can't have hurt their chances of getting a job as a developer evangelist.

Yup and the fallback position of taking a local job if they can't find remote work w/o relocating which (honestly) was the original issue I was bringing up.

It isn't finding 1 remote job that lets you work from a rural area that is the issue. It is finding 20 years worth of such jobs.

I've been working remote for over ten years now and I've never had a hard time finding work. I've never had to work for a subpar salary because of my reduced cost-of-living. Being experienced helps but ultimately it's about delivering results.

Ah yes the "well you must not be good enough" response when someone points out the average person is average. Usually followed by crabs in a bucket or pessimists or whatever.

"I can do it so the majority can" is rarely true. Even when it comes to skills I would consider as basic as handling finances intelligently or cooking a decent meal or acknowledging one's limitations.

Be careful about assuming you are exceptional because most people aren't.

For me, weather is a big issue - I’ve spent 4 years in Champaign-Urbana in Illinois, and I got sick of winter the first year I was there (two weeks where the high was -15 F, and the low was even lower than -30 F).

If the weather were better, I would seriously consider it, but I tired of suffering through that cold real fast.

Are you sure about the "lower than -30 F"?

https://www.isws.illinois.edu/statecli/cuweather/cu-averages... says the record low temperature for Champaign-Urbana, Illinois was -25F "on four(!) occasions: 9 Feb 1899, 13 Feb 1905, 19 Jan 1994, and 5 Jan 1999."

To be sure, -25F is plenty cold. I've lived one place where the temperature got that cold, and in crappy student housing where we filmed over the windows and you could see the plastic bellowing in the wind, and where a 2L Coke bottle in the pantry froze. Not something I want to do again.

It gets cold, but not near that bad or at least not for extended periods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan,_Kansas#Climate

Meh. Brownback. No funding for my kids' school if I was to move to Kansas.

No tourism or things to do that are different.

Miles and miles of miles and miles.....

I might move back to my home state in the Midwest, if they got rid of their own Brownback equivalent... but Kansas... meh.

Sorry!

You're making a generalization that just isn't true. My kids go to a gret public school system. I'm quite happy with the education they're receiving. (This is coming from a guy who attended one of the best public school systems in the US and went to college at Vanderbilt University, so I know what a good school is.)

Here is my test of how good a school really is. The conversation among the NON-valedictorians is:

Poor: "Why should I go to university?"

Ok: "Are you going to university?"

Better: "Which university are you going to?"

Best: "Are you going to X, Y, Z university?"

In other words, how much does the community value education?

Red states as demonstrated by their budget choices do not value education. There may be a few local exceptions. As a general statement, Kansas budget choices has demonstrated hostility to quality education. Kansas has demonstrated that tax cuts > education.

Also live outside Manhattan, KS. While there are plenty of areas of rural Kansas with poor options for Internet, some here might be surprised to know that there are a fair amount of local / rural telecoms in Kansas that have extensive fiber buildouts covering their entire service area including very small towns and rural areas.

WTC is a small local telcom in the Manhattan area with fiber built out in the nearby small cities and rural areas and they are now bringing affordable fiber with gigabit speeds into Manhattan for businesses to easily out compete expensive fiber costs and contracts from Cox and AT&T: https://www.mhk.business/trending//wtcfibermanhattan

Multiple coworking spaces have launched here in the last couple years: https://www.manhattech.com/spaces.html

Its been interesting to find out about some of the things other people are doing remotely from here.

ISP that builds fiber here: FTTH can be pretty cheap if you have:

a) cooperative local government that lets you use the ROW (right-of-way) without a lot of hassle

b) 100% aerial plant, very little or no underground. Aerial is way cheaper.

c) relatively low cost labor for bucket truck construction crews to hang the aerial fiber.

I'd never heard of this WTC / Wamego before, not surprising since I do nothing facilities based near the midwest. But for those who are interested:

https://bgp.he.net/AS19504#_asinfo

Kind of surprising to find an ISP with that much v4 space that hasn't put effort into reaching a major IX point and actually peering with anybody yet... They have BGP sessions with Cox, and HE transit, and that's it.

I think a big deciding factor is kids/age. I'm young and still prefer the city life, so 1 college just isn't going to cut it for me.

I would agree that kids and age play a big part in the appeal of Manhattan for people outside of college age range, but it has other things going for it besides just K-State. https://livability.com/best-places/top-100-best-places-to-li...

Kansas City is only a 2 hour drive away to go do bigger city stuff.

Two hours is a looong drive outside of Kansas.

We happened to drive through Kansas on the way to a Colorado wedding, during prom season. It was interesting to see all these prom kids dressed up and meeting at truck stops to take pictures or carpool.

Who's supplying the gigabit fiber connectivity, out there?

P.S. Answered my own question. Information may be out of date, but quite limited coverage residential plans from a couple of companies, and somewhat more but still limited coverage from a few companies business class offers.

Wish I had that many choices. ATT finally dropped a fiber line into our neighborhood, but it's not hooked up yet. Given what Comcast is doing to its cable Internet pricing, here, I'm a bit afraid to see the pricing ATT will offer us. By contrast, pricing out there looks significantly better.

Prior to this, our local copper trunk has been so old/deteriorated that DSL was marginal at best (they wouldn't sell it) and Uverse was a non-starter.

I might not want to be in Manhattan, KS, but I can think of some other towns -- maybe I need to look again.

AT&T dropped fiber in my front yard too. I ignored it for a few months because previously they only offered bundles with tv and telephone and crappy speeds to boot.

A coworker told me he was getting symmetric gigabit from AT&T for $70/month so I decided to check them out. I switched from Comcast and everything has been awesome except for the supplied wireless router. My iDevices will not work reliably on it so I added my own.

My bill dropped almost in half and I got away from Comcast's metered, expensive, less reliable crap.

I am in Atlanta so the 'threat' of Google Fiber may explain the great deal I got. Not affiliated with AT&T at all and am honestly surprised at how good the service has been. YMMV

Funny, AT&T is more expensive than Spectrum where I am for even worse (if that's possible... Spectrum is pretty bad) service. We're also a Google Fiber location (albeit one of the ones that is currently frozen) and when it was announced somehow Spectrum magically "discovered" a bunch of extra bandwidth and upgraded their plans from 50/5 to 300/50 for $90/mo. Symmetric gigabit for $70 is so far off for us it might as well be science fiction. And this is Raleigh, a well populated area known for high-tech industry.

It's frustrating, and there are many places that are far worse off than us.

AT&T was offering symmetric 100mb for $40 and gigabit for $80 in my Indianapolis suburb.<br>I understand it still has a cap of 1TB if I'm not mistaken. I guess they waive it if you use Uverse TV or directTV.

Yes, even if the prices aren't extortionary, I worry about the cap.

And the usage monitoring/scraping they keep wanting to do, and the upcharge for "opting out" of that. Especially as more and more online resources block access coming from/through commercial VPN's, AWS, and other convenient means of using a VPN as an individual, to bypass such monitoring.

Yep, I keep reading about how Google Fiber (or its like) entering an area causes competitors to launch competitive offers -- just in that same area, of course.

I live in NW Kansas and we have gigabit fiber everywhere in this corner. Ruraltel/Nextech is the company that scored the $300 million grant that was a rider on the Hurricane Katrina bill for the purpose of running fiber throughout northwest Kansas.

how do you feel about tornados

I've lived in Kansas 28 years and have never seen one. Avoid a trailer park and you'll be fine.

Probably the same way he feels about earthquakes.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. I think a better one would would be hurricanes.

With hurricanes you get warning days in advance (I live in Florida). With tornadoes, you might get a few minutes warning, and with earthquakes, not so much (as far as I understand it).

I was more thinking of seasonality of them.

I’ve lived in Kansas over 20 years and only been in one.

The risk/frequency isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.