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Comment by throwaway713 | Hacker News Reader

The jobs may be spreading out but the compensation sure hasn’t been. The best paying jobs with the most interesting, cutting-edge work are still located in just a few cities. I keep hoping some more opportunities will appear in the southeast near my family, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, so for the time being I will be staying in the Bay Area.

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As a remote employee, I'd argue quite the opposite is happening.

Sure, the absolute top paying jobs still require you to live and work in a few, select cities. However, there are many companies that are competing with SF/NYC companies regardless of talent location.

Remote employees account for a very tiny percentage of the job market, to the point where it quite literally doesn't matter.

Correct. However, the opportunities are certainly there.

Any leads?

Check the monthly job threads on HN. Last months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419536

There are a couple of good tools for searching.

I've had an extremely good response rate from the HN jobs. It seems to have a lot more motivated listings.

Weworkremotely.com is my go to for remote specific jobs. There are dozens of spin-offs, but they essentially scrape the same underlying data.

Weworkremotely seems to have less desirable/less motivated roles, but I have had some good conversations. You will notice a handful of companies that seem to be endlessly posting on those sites.

Today, but large scale efforts like city development happen over multiple decades, over which the number of remote workers will almost certainly increase due to new technology.

Undoubtedly. At the same time wages will likely drop for them, as developers buy in to the rather stupid notion that their geographic location, rather than the value of their labor, should have anything whatever to do with their salaries.

I think rennie working is difficult culturally, we have the technology for at least 10 years

Compensation may be lagging but still being pushed up by national competition and a mobile workforce. However the 2x cost of living premium over the national average in the Bay Area doesn’t seem to have any downward pressure.

Then the cutting edge work seems to be rather myopically focused on advertising, surveillance, yuppie culture products or developer tools.

Plenty of arguments for talent to look away from the Bay Area.

I think the latest Bay trend has been acquihiring teams on in remote locations to cut down on labour costs by shifting more responsibility onto those areas with lower costs of living.

Right? If these companies could stop being so reliant on in person meetings they could save money on office space and just pay me more for being remote where I want to live.

If those companies didn't need people on-site, the jobs would, and typically do, go overseas to lower-wage countries. There are tons of companies using remote work. It's called outsourcing.

There are plenty of remote employment opportunities that are stable career paths. So I don't think it's fair to say that as soon as remote work is a possibility the job will be sent overseas.

I think the early 2000s burned a lot of companies for trying to cheap out on dev costs by offshoring - offshoring is a valid choice in some situations and will probably become more and more competitive as time goes on... but there still is quite a lot of value in hiring out of the four year uni grad pool.

You think the only barrier to outsourcing white collar work is the physical location of workers?

The companies are also signaling that they find random in person collaboration more valuable than heads down efficiency.

I imagine there is a correlation between novel/interesting ideas that generate new revenue and being immersed in an environment of peers that you collaborate/chat with.

Anecdotally I would imagine the opposite. I am not going to innovate for you after even a 20 or 30 minute commute and all the in-office interruptions and ceremony. After 5 I'm out the door and the lights upstairs are off. I'm not responding to emails or picking up my phone.

However remotely I am basically never off. A common thing that comes up with remote work is you have a hard time just turning off, but I don't mind as I'm not mentally exhausted by interruptions and can actually enjoy the work I'm doing.

But I'm sure its a person to person thing, type of environment, industry, etc.

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