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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

I don't know man?

You'd be surprised how attached people are to their spouses or partners. Doesn't matter how badly you want to work at Google, if your spouse is an IP attorney or VP at an academic hospital, as a family you just can't go moving to the middle of nowhere. It's not ALL about being able to work at Google. There's a lot more going on in making these decisions. (At least there is for the type of people that Google would be interested in.)

Much better to be in that NYC-Boston-DC corridor where high powered opportunities abound in multiple sectors. Or SF. Or Chicago. Etc. But trying to move a lot of these types of couples to, say, Lincoln Nebraska, is just asking for trouble. The spouses or partners are definitely not going to go for that.

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This!

I’m sure Google (etc) could lure a lot of young, single folks out to the hinterlands for a year or two, but retention and recruiting further up the ladder would be awful.

Universities in the US, which—for historical reasons-are often located in rural areas, have similar problems. They solve this through “spousal hires.” This can range from merely coordinating interviews and offers across departments [0] to creating entirely new positions, or even tenure lines, for a rockstar’s spouse.

This can work relatively well for universities, but I’ve never heard of companies doing anything similar. I wonder if you could even get a set of companies to agree to preferentially hire their employees’ spouses, so there’s a more diverse set of options.

[0] The university often kicks in some money so that both departments will be happy with (say) their number three picks, instead of history hiring an unattached rockstar and chemistry getting no one.

> spousal hires

Happened to a prof in my university just this year. Had offers from top universities & labs for tenure in CS, but stayed in our rural college town because of his SO.

And also for those with kids you have to think about them i.e. what opportunities will they have living in this area when they leave school.

Why would a kid stay in the same area after leaving school? That was categorically out of the question for my graduating classes.

Why?

Because people are attached to their family and friends and also most don't realize that any able body person with an IQ of 100 and a decent work ethic could easily make six digits if they relocated to the right area.

Where could any randomly selected person from the upper 50% of the population by IQ move and earn >$100,000? Even with your caveats, though at that pay I do wonder why “able bodied” is important.

You go to the best college you can get into, wherever it is, and then to the best job you can get, wherever that is. Our city was okay, but our school system and community values were not calibrated to produce contentment with mediocrity.

You might pass on opportunities for social stability reasons in middle age, but as a 22-year-old you jump without hesitation.

People sometimes migrate back when their own kids are school-aged.

To remain near family?

To help shape the future of the community that rasied them?

What was deal with your class? You lived in the middle of knowhere and the only option would have been farming or mining coal or something?

Sense of adventure / lower familial pressure.

You can always come back to "shape the community" (so american ^^) later

Europeans, Asians, etc don't see themselves as an influence on the place they live?

It’s a social class thing. Most Americans live very near where they grew up.

www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/387736/

> Of all respondents, about 54 percent said that they lived in close proximity to where they grew up.

nypost.com/2018/01/11/a-shocking-number-of-americans-never-leave-home/amp/

> 11 percent of survey respondents have never traveled outside of the state where they were born.

I agree. But if you’re a Google employee, you and your offspring are in the social class that can afford to move wherever makes sense.

Right out of school? Maybe. My first job, I did indeed not really consider location at all. And I would not have lived in the city I took the job long term and moved when I left the job after 3 years, albeit to go back to school which had been more or less my plan from the beginning in any case.

In addition to the reasons you give, there's also whether you like a place. I might (or might not) be willing to make some tradeoffs for a locale that's particularly desirable for recreational opportunities and so forth. But not for an exercise in creating a new city, revitalizing one, etc.

That's now a small minority of a minority. It's more usual for just one partner to have the especially high powered career. Even more so after starting a family.

For those that have both then sure, it's more nuanced and may come down to which of the two has the better future chances, or to make different decisions. Most potential workers will not be in that situation at all.

> It's more usual for just one partner to have the especially high powered career. Even more so after starting a family.

I believe the few high profile people who actually make the big decisions will usually have a partner who has a high profile career as well. Those key people wont move because their partner wont move.

I don't know about that. The two most common spouse occupations, of people I knew at Google in NYC, were lawyer and some sort of financier. Often (more than a few of those I knew) the spouse made more money and Google was effectively daycare for the other.

And in hotbeds like NYC, with the opportunities all over town, there's little career reason to go somewhere else. If Google left NYC, they'd lose most of their engineering team to other tech firms in the city.

The draw of NYC is also at least somewhat unique. I went to grad school with a lot of NY natives. A lot of them really cannot imagine living anyplace else. What? You can't do X at 3am? Inconceivable.

As someone who lives in New York City, that rings true to me. I remember being taken aback the first time I visited a smaller town and heard the ice cream shop was closed at 8 pm on a Sunday. It took a period of adjustment before I realized I was the odd one :)

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