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Comment by kbsletten | Hacker News Reader

I have a dream that rural work will become more popular. I live in a city where all the local kids go to the oil fields or get out of Dodge, but I've heard a lot of comments from families that they'd do just about anything not to work out of town. With remote work, you could have more families and offset the retiree population, making this a more vibrant community. Does anybody have experience with starting a coders group in a low-density area like this?

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Anecdotal, but I'd take lower pay to go remote and move back to my hometown (not a small town, but a small city with a weaker tech market than where I currently live). Being able to live near your friends and family that you grew up with is a massive benefit.

Sometimes

   financial capital + social capital = const

> Being able to live near your friends and family that you grew up with is a massive benefit.

On the other hand, some of us are trying to get as far away from those as possible.

I've been working remotely in various forms for nearly a decade, while also living in a rural area.

Organizing coder groups is hard, but one of the most interesting things I've discovered is that you don't get to be as picky about the specifics of technology. A hacker group (which is in a bit of down period right now), had a bunch of hardware guys, an active member of the clang community, a few Haskell/FP curious guys and someone who mostly worked in network device manufacturing. Really, really neat group of people, with even a few women. What you don't get are your hyper-focused Python groups or groups dedicated to frameworks like Rails, which I always thought was probably a net-gain.

I think this is already happening. Mid-size city demographics are shifting significantly, especially those within an hour band of a reasonable larger city (700k+).

Texas Monthly did a good piece on this recently. https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/high-rents-rural-re...

I’ve seen some contracting firms do domestic “ruralshoring,” but IMO recruitment costs become controlling due to the lower density of talent and general difficulty with remote management as a practice. The common approach is to concentrate on small university towns that have a young CS talent pool — similar to Epic’s hiring approach — but eventually your talent moves to urban areas for culture/amenity/economy reasons, so you end up with a predominantly young remote workforce, which brings its own managerial issues.

Second this. I'm particularly interested in whether or not the rise of remote work will affect the demographics of smaller cities that have some appeal from a tourism perspective. I can think of so many cities with low costs of living and vibrant cultures that are fun to visit, but where I could never live because of the lack of work. I wonder how that all changes when the majority of jobs are remote-friendly.

Which cities are you thinking of? Vibrant cultures that are fun to visit for a week or vibrant cultures that are fun to live in for 10+ years?

Is there a difference? A lot of people would only want to visit in NY or SF but plenty others would happily live their whole lives there. The existence of a vibrant culture should tell you that some people do like living there (otherwise the culture wouldn't exist).

That's fair. I agree. I didn't think about it that way at all. I've lived in NYC for all but 6 years of my life so I'm definitely in the could live in large metropolis my whole life category

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