On a tangent, I highly recommend "Internet of Shit" Twitter account if you want to have a laugh:
Compare Vancouver with a small town of less than 100k people just up the Fraser valley (Chilliwack). I've lived in both.
Vancouver has better restaurants, more concerts of every sort, better transit, access to the ocean, better internet, is more diverse, more liberal politics, better social services for the homeless and those needing mental health services, better access to diverse foods at the grocery stores, better night life, etc.
Sure, I paid a lot more when I was living in Vancouver that. I was in Chilliwack, but it's worth it.
No amount of videoconferencing technology can make up for the fact that if I want to go out for good sushi and I live in Chilliwack, I have to spend 2 fucking hours in the car each way.
Smaller cities are not universally conservative. Decent coffee can be found in most places, and this didn't used to be true. Many smaller cities that get some tourist traffic have small downtowns with good restaurants; maybe not every kind of ethnic restaurant, but some good choices.
There is not a big migration of retirees to big cities, so it seems pretty clear that it's all about the jobs. Without the attraction of a big paycheck, people look for smaller "nice" cities that have enough.
Could just be that retirees can't afford to live in the big cities.
When i was in my mid 20s, living in inner London was vital to me, because it meant i was close to the cool bars, nightclubs, art galleries (really!), and all my friends, who also lived in inner London. Now i am approaching my 40s, none of those things are much use to me, but i appreciate the fact that in my not-quite-inner-London suburb i have a good neighbourhood coffee shop, and some excellent bakeries and a big DIY shop nearby. I should imagine that in my 60s, i will value different things, and in my 80s, different things again.
If it’s just a case of the future being unevenly distributed, where in the world is an example of the distributed future? It’s certainly not the Bay Area, for a start.
That's comfortable both in terms of literal headset weight but also latency, resolution, sound, etc.
When I sit down in front of a 48" TV I'm absorbed into a different world and forget where I am. When VR is good enough you can spend hours inside the virtual world, that's when it can be called good enough.
It's not there yet, but sure we might be there in a generation or two.
Because productivity is all about being seated on the office.
I find it so old fashioned how by default, they expect me to stand in the rain for 2 hours a day to travel to the centre of a city to sit at a desk and log into the internet for 38 out of 40 hours a week.
That is a real life equivalent of a code smell.
PS: Where did you first learn of the expression "code smell"? I'm curious because I recently heard of it and would like to know if it was from the same source
If you have a remote team, you'll still have teamleaders and/or managers that keep things in sync with the company goals.
This is of course quite a caricature, but it illustrates the issue unless the company is willing to allocate manpower to be in continues dialog with an outsourcing company.
I have worked for an outsourcer and that's not what happened. I know dozens of people who continue to work for outsourcers, that is not what happens. They have daily standups with the team in Toronto, London, Berlin, etc. They fly back & forth at least monthly. They have video calls nearly daily. They have shared Slack instances, shared Confluence instances, shared JIRA instances.
And that's not just in software; when Tesla outsources a part, they don't just throw a spec over the wall. When Apple outsources manufacturing, they also don't have this caricatured approach. When Nike outsources manufacturing, they have Nike employees in the factories. And so on.
Since your caricature doesn't reflect the reality that I have years of experience with, I'm not sure it adds much to the argument.
The reality though is that remote work will always be priced down. Even if remote workers show up everyday by some kind of robotic telepresence, once that remote role is established there's enormous pricing pressure from literally every other worker on the planet. Everybody seems to think its corporations that are resistant to remote work when in reality its actually workers who are very hesitant to take on remote roles and do not want to be seen as some sort of outsourced and easily replaceable remote provider.
It will take a sea change in the culture and desires of workers to make remote work a real possibility at scale. Workers will have to embrace a vision of themselves as freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
This is the important point.
> freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
That's because outsourcing and freelancing are mostly a mechanism for fleecing labor. Workers SHOULD be terrified of this.
I would love to outsource some of out development, but to align that work with our goals, I would need a full time senior dev with intimate knowledge of our company and customers working with them managing all they do. Otherwise it's not a given that we get the code quality that ensure we can evolve the software the way we need to in the future.
Meanwhile remote work means having the worker not need to come into the office at all - each employee can theoretically be anywhere in the world, whether that be in the midwest or in Eastern Europe.
With remote work, the workers are still employees of your company, they just don't always sit in your office.
The problem is that employees want something and then justify that thing being good in whatever way works.
I mean... of course getting fired sucks. I'm actually surprised that you seem to be arguing that getting fired should be considered a good thing?
Is it possible that there might be some complexity to this beyond boring old corporate inertia? As you so correctly say, there are talented people hungry for work everywhere.