Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents | Hacker News Reader

Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

bloomberg.com

258 pointskjhughes405 comments

I'm pretty bearish on the pandemic actually leading to massive change in the number of people permanently working from home. My boss put out a survey a week or two ago among my org (30 or so people), and 70% said that they want to work from the office, full time, 20% said some time or most of the time, and 10% said fully remote. And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home during the pandemic (young, no kids, etc). I just don't think that this will change much.

There is just too much detrimental effect one one's career from not being seen at the office. For a company that's not fully remote (i.e. gitlab), people who are fully remote are going to fall behind in promotions, etc. There's just not enough benefit for people who don't hate the bay area.

I asked this casually with /polly in slack the other day and was surprised that our engineering department was split 50/50. 50% thinking we should go fully remote and 50% being very adamant that they needed an office to work in the majority of the time.

One factor that might bias these results are the type of setup that one has in the office compared to the home, primarily available space (i.e. spare bedrom) and office equipment (i.e. ergonomic chairs home/office & large/multiple computer monitors).

That actually isn't bad is it? Cut back 50% on office space for savings (or leave some extra for growth), and have both groups accommodated.

The follow-on repercussion is that the pendulum swings even further to open-seating hot desk arrangements.

While I think that's true, I work for a company that even normally has a lot of remote and mostly WFH employees. In general, people who come in more then X% of the time can still get an assigned spot. But--at least if space is tight--you'll need to hot desk if you just come in a day or two per week or less.

> young, no kids, etc

There is your major reason for that survey result. Companies with median-older workforces will see more enthusiasm for remote work.

I read it the other way. Only people who are young with no distractions at home, favor working at home. People who usually have family members at home, get too distracted compared to a office environment, to prefer working at home.

Mid 30s, partner, two kids, will only work from home. Will not consider a commute or an office. Have worked remotely for almost a decade. Doing the math, I've saved almost 3360 hours by not having to commute (~2 hr/workday), not to mention wear and tear on a vehicle and the associated commute costs.

When my office door is closed, everyone knows I'm "at work". If you don't have a separate physical space where you only work, I can see how this might be a challenge.

I'm 30s as well, partner, no kids, will only work in office. I won't consider remote anymore after two experiences with different companies (during 4+ years). Worked in office and remotely equally long in total. I never see the same productivity in myself or others when working remote compared to the office.

I think it just boils down to different people have different needs and work differently. Remote works well for some, offices work well for some. We will never find something that works 100% for everyone.

Thanks for the anecdote though :)

No worries, hope it helps others makes the leap. I agree it doesn't work for everyone, but there are so many benefits for both society and workers, it should be mandated that businesses are required to accommodate it similar to what Germany is discussing [1].

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/german-labor-minister-calls-for-right-...

There are also a lot of people who like aspects of both in person office work and remote work, and would like the flexibility to plan their weeks accordingly.

I personally value the in-person collaboration at the office, but many days I don't feel like facing the rush hour - usually on the way home which is more crowded.

I'd prefer to routinely WFH in the AM after the kids start school, go into work around 11AM. have meetings and lunch with teammates, leave around 3, and then finish the day working from home. This would let me avoid rush hour while still getting in person interaction with my coworkers.

==When my office door is closed, everyone knows I'm "at work". If you don't have a separate physical space where you only work, I can see how this might be a challenge.==

Now add a partner who also works from home. Will the extra space (and hardware) needed to comfortably fit all these new home workers be another cost shifted from companies to employees?

If my company wants me to work from home much longer; they need to provide a better desk chair, a new screen, and better keyboard/mouse attachments.

My company provides a very generous allowance (~$1000) for work from home equipment (desk, etc). Yours should too, and if they don't, vote with your feet.

Good call, I should just go get a new job in the middle of the worst destruction of jobs in history. After I do that, my one-time $1,000 stipend won't make my house bigger.

The point is that if more people are going to work from their houses, then houses will need to be bigger in the medium- to long-term.

Should you live near your job if it's expensive? Your choice. Should your employer pay you more if they can pay someone less who lives somewhere cheaper? Their choice. If you want to live in a small place in the city, there is a cost. If it's not pleasant to work from there because there isn't enough space, that is part of the cost. You are competing with folks who can now work from home, and have the space to do so effectively. Is that good or bad? No, it just is.

Life is about choices. I'm enumerating my choices because I want to help others make choices that help them have a higher quality of life when the choice presents itself. Do what is best for you. I apologize if any of my responses come across as anything less than helpful; my intent is to be helpful.

What decisions were made years ago? I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.

A lot has changed in a matter of 3 months. Decisions are constantly being re-evaluated with new information. I was simply opining on how something like "an increase in working from home" might actually have larger societal impacts.

This article suggests people might move away from expensive places like Silicon Valley. I am suggesting there is another angle, the amount of space people have available at home to actually perform work. It shifts the burden of finding a work station off employers and onto employees. Does a one-time stipend of $1,000 cover that? Probably not for many people.

>Does a one-time stipend of $1,000 cover that? Probably not for many people.

On the other hand, commuting is usually not cheap--even if it's just a transit pass. Your points about space are reasonable though most people I know with houses seem to be doing OK. (But then we're a large distributed company so many are on video calls from home on a regular basis anyway.)

It's certainly fair though that, if you have a tiny city apartment that's just a place to sleep, that can't be very pleasant right now and you'd probably want to rethink if going into an office becomes no longer a typical daily activity. (Some companies will pay for co-working space so that may be one option.)

==On the other hand, commuting is usually not cheap==

Not cheap, but tax advantaged and sometimes even reimbursed. The tax advantages for working-from-home are much harder to unlock, especially in the short-term or if you work from your bedroom.

Anyways, I thought it was an interesting economic thought-exercise to discuss the second-level impacts of a work-from-home society. I've seen a lot of talk on people fleeing cities, but I think there is a lot more nuance to the discussion.

"tax-advantaged" just means "discounted". It's still a large expense. Why would an employer reimburse commute costs but not pay a workstation stipend to non-commuters (possibly marked down 50% due to taxes)?

The government reimburses the commute costs through the tax code.

Which government? In the UK there's all sorts of effort in the tax system to ensure that commutes to work are not tax deductible.

Should I subsidize my employer by reducing the need for them to rent an office space? They're basically now getting free space and shifting the cost to me. Same applies to the cost of electricity, heating (I'm at home 8hrs more than I would otherwise), time spent getting food / cooking, etc. There may be more hidden costs and some people may not be OK with their employer not participating in those. Everything's a choice, but I think people should be careful and make sure they are not cheating themselves out of something that the employer would normally provide (or at least make sure they're fine with it).

You're already subsidizing them by driving to the office, unless they are paying for your car, gas, and time.

By working at home, I'm saving time and money. I'm happy to take the increased responsibility of creating a workable space. Most people end up doing that anyway and call it a workshop/sewing room/etc.

> Should I subsidize my employer by reducing the need for them to rent an office space?

Bob working from home, costs $salary, say $10k a month

Carl, working from office, costs $salary + office space

Office space costs say $5k a month, so total $15k a month

If all things are equal, who would be employed? Maybe Bob charges $14k a month, still undercutting Carl's $15k/month total.

> You are competing with folks who can now work from home, and have the space to do so effectively. Is that good or bad? No, it just is.

Also, out of curiosity, how far would you be willing to take this sentiment? I'm originally from Poland - if I could live there and still earn my current US salary, I'd probably be able to buy one apartment every year and still have money left over to live comfortably. So, should you actually compete with others? If so, are you OK with them undercutting you? Would it be good or bad if they did? :)

So... $1000 for a fancy electric standing desk. $1000 for a fancy chair. $1000 for better monitors + arms. $200 for a keyboard. $100 for a mouse. We're looking at less than $3500 for a mid-level setup.

The cost of a bit of equipment is a joke compared to the cost of another bedroom. Adding another room to a house is tens of thousands of dollars. Buying a home with another room is also the same cost or more depending on where you live (bay area - another bedroom can easily be $200k+!). Renting - same problem.

I wouldn't get hung up on equipment costs when the cost of space is far greater. (Even if you replace all furniture every 3 years)

==I wouldn't get hung up on equipment costs when the cost of space is far greater.==

I think you misread my comment because this was my exact point. Fundamentally shifting 8-10 hours of our day back to our homes will directly impact how we set up our homes. What might those impacts be? More space is the first one that comes to mind because I feel it everyday with two people working-from-home.

On the bright side though, you can move to a location that has more space at a lower cost. As more people do so, you should also expect to see more restaurants, coffee shops, etc. open up outside of the highest density areas.

And then prices increase... and it's almost like you've just moved the problem from one area to another.

I'm convinced America is just going to continue to sprawl. I don't think there will ever be a case where we'll actually increase the density of cities overall beyond that of typical SFH density. (And thus more cars, less public transit, etc.)

> And then prices increase... and it's almost like you've just moved the problem from one area to another.

Yes, making a location more desirable by increasing its amenities will raise prices. The way to counter that is to make those sorts of amenities that people desire (cafes, transit, walkability) more broadly available, not to stifle them.

Where the hell do you live and/or shop where a suitable office chair costs $1000?

That's the (more or less starting) price of a high-end Herman Miller chair like an Aeron or Embody. Which is simultaneously a lot of money and a very reasonable purchase for something you spend a lot of time in if you can afford it.

I cannot recommend an Aeron chair enough. It is worth it. I'm sitting in one right now, the one I picked up for a song in 2001 after the dot com bust from (ironically enough) a liquidated startup. It has lasted me that long.

For anyone who is interested - you can regularly get these used for under $400 from a variety of used office suppliers.

For obscure chairs - you can sometimes get a roaring good deal by just setting up alerts on Craigslist. It's how we got a Hag Capisco for $350 instead of paying nearly $900 - good as new too.

Unfortunately my ~15-yo Aeron which was getting increasingly wobbly seems to be down for the count. I'll look into repair when I can. Fortunately I have another chair at home which is by no means an Aeron but isn't bad.

Contact herman Miller, it can generally be repaired, and it may even be under warranty still. I’ve gotten an aeron repaired, it was easy and relatively painless.

I have my same £120 ikea desk + chair I've had since 2011, I have a 5 year old desktop (£1500), three monitors (£400), a 9 year old laptop (£900), my own printer (£50), and multiple network options (£150 of switches). Work provided everything but the printer and desk/chair. Pretty tiny.

If I go to the office (mainly for socialisation, sometimes for large whiteboarding afternoons), I have a fight to see if I can perch on the end of a desk nowhere near anyone I work with on a tiny laptop, massively unproductive.

My office at home is about 80 square foot, and it has a pull down bed in it too for guests. London office prices puts that at £4,000 per month[0]. Manchester is £2700 a month, Liverpool £1300 a month.

The mortgage on my _entire house_ is 20% of the cost of a desk in London, the cost of my house is about £1 per square foot, and that includes the capital repayment.

[0] https://www.mgmt.ucl.ac.uk/capital-of-entrepreneurs

Who is taking care of the kids when the 'door is closed'? I guess it depends on how old your kids are... I have a 4 year old and a 1 year old, so someone has to be watching them all the time.

Also, my house only has 3 bedrooms, and the kids take two of them. My office is in the corner of the living room with no walls. I can't lock anyone out of it.

Your house has to be large enough to support a home office to work from home full time.

Although if I wasn't living in this city I could probably afford a bigger house... we pay a premium to live within 10 minutes of work, so we don't have to face that 'two hour commute' you speak of.

> Who is taking care of the kids when the 'door is closed'?

Same person taking care of them when you're at work. Except for 3 hours a day less

Most day care centers are still closed.

You miss the point -- if you send your kids off to school/daycare/whatever while you commute an hour to an office, spend 8 hours there, plus socialising, then an hour back, you can send your kids off to school/daycare/whatever for 8 hours.

There's likely a few things at play. While working from home might be a little harder with distractions, those distractions generally imply of a lot of other considerations that make working from home appealing. Juggling work and getting kids to school, and getting them ready for school, and various errands needed for kids (i.e. teacher meetings, after school activities, after school care), mean there are many, many benefits to opening up your schedule somewhat by not being requires to be at an office. I would be happy to shift an extra 30-60 minutes of commute and other time to productive work time if it lessened the stress of juggling all these competing responsibilities.

It really depends on how old your kids are. If your kids are of school age then the distraction at home is minimal. I'm sure someone is going to come in reply with "omg but they're real rascals in the morning!!!!" I would weigh that vs morning commute time and then throw in saving the post-work commute for free.

Even if they aren't of school age, paying for daycare vs potentially much lower cost of living is an easy trade for a lot of people. That's not even getting into the difference between public school choices or much reduced private school tuition available in the rest of the country.

When we had daycare, I liked working from home. With no daycare, I can't get anything done at home.

But working from home doesn't require people to pull their kids out of daycare?

No but covid-lockdown induced WFH is not allowing also daycare to go to work I guess, also al schools/day-care business are/should be closed?

Fair enough. I assumed this was regarding a more normal state after covid.

Currently all daycare are closed where I am.

> People who usually have family members at home, get too distracted compared to a office environment, to prefer working at home.

Don't mix up "working from home" with "remote work", once you leave the city of your office.

I know at least a few people who would love to go live near their "core communities" from their youth, to rent their own little office downtown near the only diner with unlimited coffee, next to the two lawyers & one dentist.

And at least for a couple of them, they'd love to "commute" once a month out of Middletown/Discovery Bay, stay at the same motel 6 in Sunnyvale for a Thursday, Friday & expense it as business travel.

Though, a lot of this isn't about economics, but mostly about personal goals.

Working from home with kids around as we are now is distracting, but under normal circumstances the kids are at school, daycare, or otherwise supervised.

Having a family brings with it some other major concerns. You will want a larger home, a good school district, a safe neighborhood, and a short commute. A childless person who lives in an apartment in the city and doesn't think twice about getting home at 7 is likely to value the time in the office much differently than a parent trying to make brutally expensive house, a miserable commute, and family time work.

As others have touched on, single people might really enjoy the atmosphere of their office space as an escape from small apartments.

People with younger kids are probably having a hard time balancing work with kids' needs. My 14yo is absolutely independent with distance learning. In the 6 weeks or so that she started it, she needed help less than 10 times.

You can't imagine the relief from just being able to throw in a load of laundry mid-morning, take the dog for a walk at lunch, and starting a meal immediately after work. Working from home is a major stress reliever for family people. My wife and I are also saving quite a bit from not driving our cars, not going out for coffees or lunches, etc.

When we're not in the middle of a pandemic and kids are at school, camps, etc., working from home is a major boon for family people.

> get too distracted compared to a office environment

Opposite for me. I bought a house big enough to have an office without distraction. An environment I can control, unlike the office where distraction is everywhere.

In my 30s, married, with kids, and a dog. Will NEVER willingly commute into an office. I'm significantly more productive and have build a life style around getting my work done, quick lunch break, walking the dog is get up from my desk at healthy intervals. When paired with a results only work environment, allows me to handle errands during non peak hours and then finish up any remaining work in the evening hours after things calm down and there are fewer distractions.

1. Morning: Meetings 2. Afternoon: Actual work 3. Family/dinner 4. Evenings after a break: Catch up with any email/work slack 5. Time with wife/family 6. Sleep and repeat.

I LOVE not having to factor commute time in with all this. So productive.

God yes. That extra hour or two a day is worth any pay cut I might theoretically take. And I'm content maybe being a lead or a senior engineer for a while. I don't care that much about promotions.

I actually got a huge raise changing jobs from a fully in-office one to a fully remote one though.

Super agree with this. I have a wife, twin 7 y/o boys, and an infant. I would so much rather not have to deal with the commute and office BS on a regular basis.

The time that I previously spent on commuting can now be redirected towards spending time with my family, straightening the house, doing yard work, getting groceries, working on personal projects, reading, exercising, etc.

Even with normally short commute, I find myself saving 1-1.5 hrs daily. It doesn't sound like a lot, but when your margin for time is already SO tight, it can make a big difference.

In my company it’s the opposite. Every parent in the company is voicing very strong opinions to work from the office.

The main issue seems to be that (a) they need full time childcare during the workday period, regardless of whether they are home or not, and (b) the childcare cannot take place inside the same house where they are working.

The opinion I’ve heard most is that if it was non-pandemic times, at best they would be indifferent or maybe commute would be the factor, because the kids would be going to stay somewhere via family / day care / school.

But in the case that kids have to be home because school is shut down / child care closes / child care has to be hosted in the same place where they are working, it’s a straight up no-go, 100% dead set against it. The employer must provide some different pandemic-acceptable option, like private offices that don’t require mass transit to get to.

It has been almost completely one-sided in our surveys and company all hands meetings, all parents with school-age kids or younger are completely against remote work (this is maybe 200-300 staff), and everyone else is completely against anything other than remote work (around 700 staff).

Full disclosure: I am one of the 700 with no kids who prefers switching to 100% remote.

I'd love to know their children's ages. My experience is that people with kids under 12 have a very hard time working with the kids around. The kids just need more help. My daughter is 14. She goes into the room we setup for her each day, does her school work, attends Hangouts her teachers setup, and then entertains herself when her school day finishes. At lunch, we're able to eat as a family and go for a walk so working from home with her around is a pleasant experience.

An important factor is that my team works from home regularly so, when offices shut down, we were already setup for 100% remote work. People who haven't had time to really setup may have been overwhelmed for a bit.

> But in the case that kids have to be home because school is shut down / child care closes / child care has to be hosted in the same place where they are working, it’s a straight up no-go, 100% dead set against it.

So basically, they expect their spouses to deal with the problem by themselves? At home they pretend there is no choice, while at work lobby to keep excuse to not have to contribute?

Do I sound salty about phenomenon I noticed among some of my male colleges too (using work as excuse when they definitely had choice, but actually wanted to avoid boring or uncomfortable home-work)?

That, or employees a little suspicious of consequence-free honesty here.

I came here to say this. Working remote forever with my kids at home would be difficult, but when my kids were at school, it was great. The flexibility and lack of commute more than made up for the lack of socializing at work.

When I was younger, the latter was far more important.

I think you are right. I worked on a startup that had a few hundreds employees. Most of them in the early twenties. Every week day, a rotating subgroup of 5 to 10 of them would go to the bar after work. On Thursdays and Fridays there would be more like 30 to 80 people. I was already married, in my late thirties, so I would go home. You could tell everyone was eager to the end of the day. They were personal friends, not just coworkers.

I miss that environment, even though I was not part of the bar tradition (I don’t even drink). I can only imagine how they are feeling about working from home these days.

Remote is not a no-brainer forced by shortsighted employers like the general impression I get from HN. It is an option with serious trade-offs on both sides.

Indeed a lot of people especially when they start out, move to a new location. Away from family and friends and the office banter and social keeps them sane and not lonely.

Same with many older staff, kids have moved out or have their own lives. So many again love the office gossip and banter. Enjoying poping to the cafe or pub at lunchtime with others.

They also realise they need to ensure they are not just a remote voice on a concall and the odd email.

It seems at present the younger and older with lockdown are suffering more than those in more busier households.

I'm young with no kids and appreciate remote work / working from home (up to 3 days a week but not more).

Can exercise when I want during the day, easier to run errands and less frustration of commuting.

Median older workforces own more square footage and are probably much happier and better situated to build out a home office. I now need to devote some of my 600 sq feet to subsidize my company's office needs out of my own pocket. All my friends from growing up who lived in big houses with pools are moving back in with their parents during this pandemic, basically having childhood 2.0 with far more booze at all hours. Being strapped to my desk in my tiny apartment is not fun compared to pool days all summer.

I'm 24, live independently and don't have any children. I am very enthusiastic about remote working because it let's me live a life outside of work.

Living in a place ~70 miles from London, commuting eats up to 4 hours of my day. That's 4 hours unpaid that I could spend on hobbies, socialising and maybe even just doing absolutely nothing. Commuting to London also costs a ridiculous amount of money - which I would rather invest in my future.

For me, it's about balance. Sure, I'm expected to work 8 hours a day. But when I'm working 8 hours, and commuting 4, what life do I have to myself other than eating, cooling off from working and eating, and sleeping?

Before quarantine, working, eating and sleeping were my life. I was miserable. Due to the obvious health concerns we were then allowed to work from home.

The additional free time made me realise how much of my life I wasn't living for myself, I picked up my hobbies, I exercise more and am overall much happier. Due to that, I am lot more productive. I don't think I'll ever go back to that lifestyle, as I would rather live than just exist. I feel like I deserve a life, and I don't think I'm alone in that feeling.

What I guess I'm trying to get at is, it should be on an individual level, an individual balance. And I personally believe, on an individual level people want a life that suits them rather than the company they work for - and that's how I believe life should be.

Capitalism seems to suggest the one size fits all, be in the office during working hours, or you won't succeed is the only way to succeed - and it's painfully ignorant to how people actually may want to live their lives, and doesn't reflect what we're capable of as a society.

Of course, this is my personal opinion, and the above may suit an awful lot of people. But there are also an awful lot of talented people in the world that have commitments that don't allow them to make 12 hours a day sacrifices, and cannot afford to even consider moving to Silicon Valley (or in my case London) to access opportunity.

I am happy to accept there is value of socialising with colleagues in person, but that shouldn't be a necessity to offer your skills to the world.

We have the Internet, and I believe we should use it to create a more decentralised economy where more people are able to reap the benefits of capitalism and invest in their families, their local communities, businesses and their futures.

> And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home during the pandemic (young, no kids, etc). I just don't think that this will change much.

I'm not sure that follows. It seems to me that people with spouses and especially children would be more interested in working from home, not less.

While working from home, kids can often be a major distraction. Not insurmountable, but especially given that most people have been forced into some variety of home-schooling at the same time they were pushed into working from home, I could understand many people with kids choosing to go to an office.

People with kids often have different priorities. Having a slam dunk, distraction free, high productivity work day tends to be lower on the priority list. Spending time with your partner, taking care of the kids, cooking and eating dinner with the family; these all tend to be higher on the priority list.

There are exceptions. Some people don’t respond well to the stresses of family life and want to escape to the office. Hopefully these people decide not to have children in the first place.

Yes. I'm thinking of the old saying about no one ever arriving at his deathbed wishing he'd spent less time with his kids.

Wow. Someone is feeling guilty, I reckon.

Some partners and some children are bad with boundaries.

Mid 30's, married with kids, 100% for working remotely, primarily from home, at least 85% of the time.

In the company I currently work for the people who build and manage things prefer remote, and the people who interrupt them and make them less productive prefer the office.

Makes sense.

I have to agree. It brings to mind the Friends episode with Rachel being excluded for not-smoking; same dynamic will come to play with the in-office vs. remote.

The optics of being in the office will never change. Humans are very shallow and highly visual. I see - therefore you are.

That said, there is a middle ground. You have to be in the office twice a week in order to achieve the full benefit of face-to-face interaction. I, for one, would welcome having to get out of the house twice a week and go talk to actual humans, go to lunch, or to a bar.

The fact that people were forced to stay at home may influence their view. If people willingly choose to try working from home, I would guess that the result would be much different. Not only that but the fact the you are stuck at home all day long would make you eventually leaning towards getting out.

Maybe employees should just decide for themselves how they work best.

I've worked remote for a long time and agree with what you said. The company culture really needs to be focused on remote work for it to succeed. Remote first is far better than remote allowed.

I've seen/heard different numbers from elsewhere:

20% want to work from home permanently

20% want to get back to the office full time

60% want flexibility somewhere in between

Personally, I think the specific breakdown is less important than companies realizing that letting people be remote can improve work/life balance, reduces office space needs, and they have most of the infrastructure to support it.

As an industry, we still need to figure out mentorship and career development for remote/partially-remote teams, but I'm optimistic on that front.

==reduces office space needs==

While increasing their employees home-space needs. People will need bigger houses and apartments if everyone is going to work from home long-term.

Which they will find, for the same price, out in the sticks when they don't need to drive in.

Which suggests we will need to build new houses to satisfy all the demand. Which is exactly the question I was asking. How will those housing needs differ from today's? Will homes need more space for offices? play areas? gardens? bathrooms? Will multi-generational housing come back in-style to support elderly?

It's a good point. Definitely the need for a separate office.

Another important discussion along those lines is the availability of fast, reliable internet.

Many people don't want to live in the sticks, they have a preference for where they already live.

Then they can enjoy their newly-lower rent.

People need bigger houses for other reasons too, including a growing family, having space for gathering with their friends and community, for their hobbies etc. And I’m not talking about a luxurious McMansion, just something bigger than a $3500 1 bedroom apartment where you can’t have a friendsgiving with more than 4 guests.

Being able to work from home long term means not being tied to ultra-premium land for your private space. Not eating up the externality of your company deciding to hire 10s of thousands more workers in your already crammed city, not being forced to choose between the externality of longer commute time or inflated, subpar housing services.

You are talking about personal reasons that people need more space, which is absolutely true. I am talking about a fundamental shift in how we perform work as a society.

If everyone, all at once, starts working from home and avoiding offices, it is reasonable to assume that some of that office space will need to be re-created in houses, which will increase the necessary size for houses. Things like the average size of a new house and the average amenities people include (an extra office, an extra bathroom, a separated "play area", mesh wi-fi friendly, etc.).

God damn. $3,500 for a 1br apt. You must for sure live in SF lol.

That's enough to purchase a full on mansion here in Louisiana.

It's $500 more than my mortgage for a single-family-home in Chicago.

It gets even worse if you want to have your own w/d in a building that isn't 100 years old.

If people have the option to work remotely, they're more likely going to move to places where land is plentiful and cheap.

That's not helpful for the majority of people that actually like where they live. I live in the middle of a city because I like living in the middle of a city, for reasons that have nothing to do with where I work. Most people are not harboring a secret desire to suddenly move to a completely different type of neighborhood for the cheap land if they no longer have to commute.

Being forced to purchase a larger living space because a company decides to go remote is transferring a business cost to the employee. The same goes for being forced to move to a different neighborhood with land that is "plentiful and cheap" because you can't afford to buy a bigger place in your current neighborhood.

You make some good points.

I don't know that your desire matches with the majority of people living in a big city. I mean, I'm sure there are lots of people who do like living there, but there are also lots of people who have moved from elsewhere to big cities specifically for job opportunities. Being in a big city has its advantages (jobs, access to more specialized businesses and ammenities) but also its costs (crime, lack of natural beauty, etc.).

I think you may find that, after everyone who wanted to leave the city can, the costs for those who want to remain might settle down.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but you first need to establish that there is, in fact, a large group of people living in cities because they “have to” for work. I don’t think this can be treated as a fact without some evidence. The power of cities isn’t some US-only phenomenon, it has been the dominant economic engine for centuries.

Likely some selection bias there, in that your company was not fully remote when people took their jobs. People tend to take a job that is suited for them: if they want to work in an office, they take an office job, if they want to work remotely, they'll take a remote job. Remote-only or remote-primary companies exist (see: WordPress, GitHub, Gitlab, ElasticSearch, Ethereum, MakerDao); many of the people who actually want to work remotely already work for one.

I do suspect your numbers are probably pretty close to right, though, given the number of jobs at such remote-only companies vs. those at traditional Silicon Valley offices.

I suspect on the (hopefully) other side of this, you're going to have some who really don't want to go back to an office full-time and others who can't wait to be back but hate that many of their co-workers no longer come in on a typical day.

Depending on the overall employment situation, a lot of people are going to find that the office situation at their employer is no longer one they want going forward.

This survey result not surprising to me at all. Even if it was 10x more efficient to work from home in every circumstance, if the office didn't exist, we would need to invent it. There is a human social nature, and remote work goes against it.

The office makes most of us feel important and useful. Managing others who only appear on a screen doesn't have the same ego jolt as having your employees there in person. And many people want to be managed and feel lost and disconnected without an actual in-person person to guide them. And that peer camaraderie doesn't feel as nice when your peers are not psychically with you.

We have to all realize that it takes a very specific type of personality and set of life goals to thrive in a fully remote workplace.

One thing to keep in mind is that this is NOT what working remotely is really like. During normal times if I am missing socialization at work I can make up for it by going out more during the week. During normal times if I want I can spend a few hours working from the local cafe. But the cafes are closed. During normal times, kids are at school for most of the day so they don't disrupt you. But schools are closed.

I'm not suggesting people will prefer what normal remote work life is like, but I don't think they're experiencing it right now.

That is a really important point, but I think that it still doesn't counter the argument about the career downsides of being remote when you don't work for a 100% remote organization.

My company is pretty flexible but as a scientist/engineer I still have some duties where being in the lab is necessary. I'll probably increase my remote work for now but likely not move further away. I enjoy my bike commute in the East Bay.

I used to work in N Berkeley and live in Oakland by the lake. A lifestyle where you live and work in the E Bay is simply unparalleled.

People weight "career downsides" differently. A lot of folks who are further in their careers are done trying to climb the ladder and would be happy working remotely.

Two other cynical additions. Not everyone is as concerned about "productivity". Also, there's a nonzero chance that someone whose productivity drops dramatically when working from home were only ever productive because they were leeching productivity out of others. Every team seems to have someone like this, and they can be safely gotten rid of.

Yea but during normal times coworkers will be having face to face conversations at the water cooler which you will miss being remote. So you are missing external interaction, but on the other hand the playing field is level in a way that it won't be once people start going back to the office.

If your company is in multiple offices you miss those anyway.

This is also somewhat of a self-correcting problem too. If these conversations really matter so much and either information isn't transmitted efficiently throughout the organization or it becomes a remote vs office clique thing, management either finds a solution or you probably go back to everyone in the office.

What I do know is that a lot of businesses are functioning perfectly fine 100% remote right now and there's a lot of fat that can be cut converting to full-time remote. Those benefits are likely going to outweigh "But what if Timmy gets left out of a conversation?!?!" If 100% or majority remote work becomes a competitive advantage, businesses will find a way to fix the communication gap.

And guess what, having meetings with a purpose agenda and notes both reduces meetings and makes them more useful.

No idea of the business your in but remote work is not working for many sales people or client services and many others that need to deal with external customers.

If those who keep the sales and contracts coming in want offices then ceo's will ensure they get them.

Offices will become smaller and more regional but they will exist.

Over the years via osmosis I have learnt so much by overhearing colleagues talking. I met people I would not normally as not quite my line of business or typically we are both just cc'ed in emails. These have become contacts, friends, allies and others simply provided opportunities or put in a good word for me.

I can choose where I work and have pre Covid era worked a lot at home due to projects I had on. But was planing a lot more time in the office this year as I knew I needed to ensure I mixed more.

Chatting with very senior managers, directors and ceo's simply won't happen if remote. But does when your both some of the only people in a quiet satellite office.

No need to brown nose but being more than a name on a chart helps.

Everyone is working very effectively at the moment as in most places there is with lockdown little else distraction wise and many focused on ensuring they stay employed.

In fact for many employees I think the moment they don't have to take a video con call which runs on as the client knows they have no commute and little else to do. Many people will be happy.

Some companies and departments will go remote and thrive in the long-term and others will once things settle find they need many staff back in an office.

It doesn't matter if I have my laptop and a hotspot at the beach with tacos and a bucket of beers. It's an issue with a lack of effective communication on emails/slack/zoom compared with meeting with your colleagues face to face. Productivity has fallen off a cliff among everyone I've asked, and this is the reason.

At the end of the day, that comes down to the type of industry/work and whether you have effective management. Organizations that are able to make 100% remote work function properly are at a serious competitive advantage in many ways.

Personally, I've been way _more_ productive during all of this. And before the pandemic, I was somewhat of an in-office advocate myself.

Same for me. My team members have all told me their productivity is up sharply without me prompting them during 1:1s. I was a strong advocate of in-office work before, but now I think we'll probably plan 2-3 days weekly from home once work returns to the office.

Were these people with "person" jobs or "thing" jobs? Person jobs are sales, marketing, maybe even business analyst, etc. Thing jobs are coders, DBAs, accountants, etc. I find it very easy to believe that people whose job primarily revolves around other people will have serious productivity issues remotely. It's harder to comprehend that jobs around code/numbers/widgets have the same problem. I'm not saying it's impossible, just harder to understand.

Most of the marketing teams I work with were pretty distributed anyway. Direct sales does a lot of F2F normally but many/most don't have company offices. And there are Thing jobs that involve, e.g., working with hardware that can't really be done remotely.

Things and person I guess? This is in research, but any research is about communicating ideas. People need other people to help with their research and strategize the next steps, and it's hard to properly explain your thoughts and engage people with your ideas if you aren't in the same room with zero body language and have to speak one person at a time, and are bogged down by having too many zoom meetings to make up for the lack of informal meetings to do any real deep work with the time left.

It's a two pronged effect that myself and colleagues are experiencing: the meetings themselves aren't very productive due to the lack of in person communication and need to be longer to share the same quantity of information and understanding, by having to coordinate meetings between multiple people they are perfectly interspersed such that you can't really get any deep work done until 5pm rolls around and you can start burning the midnight oil uninterrupted.

Plus there is the mental side. We are friends who work together as much as we are collegues, and losing that side of interactions is tough for everyone. If I we had been working remote full time I would have never made these friendships stemming from casual random conversations, which imo really improves productivity in the group more than anything else.

How much of your day was taken up by meetings before and is the same amount of time used for the equivalent meetings now? Do you have additional "status" meetings that were hastily put together just because?

Zoom, despite being better than the past software, still is fairly bad compared to talking face to face. Low bit rate video, walkie-talkie style communication due to noise cancellation, even when you all have headphones on and other issues just make it frustrating and lower quality.

Also for tight knit teams, the lack of a daily lunch with your coworkers is something else you miss.

What are your thoughts on companies like Basecamp, Gitlab doing remote so well?

>Productivity has fallen off a cliff among everyone I've asked

You're not asking but I'm here to tell you that productivity has skyrocketed for me & those that I work directly with.

Surveys are fine and all but in some industries/companies, workers are not going to have much say in this. When it comes down to cost savings from increased productivity and reduced/eliminated office space, the decision is very easy for some. Not to say it's the right decision but it's a decision some are going to make with some limited data at hand.

>There is just too much detrimental effect one one's career from not being seen at the office. For a company that's not fully remote (i.e. gitlab), people who are fully remote are going to fall behind in promotions, etc.

I thought the model in SV/SF is often you need to change jobs to get substantial pay bumps/title increases.

I don't think I've seen anyone getting great referrals to pay bumps through changing jobs without building in-person relationships

I see it from the opposite side. This won't be employee-pulled, but company-pushed.

Many organizations are going to be significantly cash-strapped at the end of this recession. One of the juiciest targets will be cutting the high fixed cost of office leases. Especially in expensive areas like Silicon Valley. If a company can push the average employee to work from home 3 days a week, they can convert to floating desks and cut their real estate costs by 50% or more.

I run a small tech company in the Bay Area, and while rents are not cheap, they end up being a very small percentage of costs - particularly compared to salaries.

I think you'll find some companies that your suggestion as workable but I don't see a lot of companies embracing it wholesale from a financial perspective.

Also most leases are fairly locked it's not an easy way to address short-term cash flow issues, especially compared to reducing headcount.

Floating desks sounds really unenjoyable. Plus I'd have health concerns about that before a vaccine is developed.

I might be simplifying too much, but I would be surprised if more remote work didn't catch on. A decentralized workforce is easier to control in some aspects that are incredibly attractive to corporate leaders.

Fewer spontaneous and f2f interactions between people makes it easier to:

1) Ensure folks are focusing primarily on work instead of anything else associated with being a part of a company

2) All hierarchical decisions (promoting / not promoting) can be done without much personal interaction so turns employees more into school children where grades on certain things determine moving up or not

3) Easier to fire folks if you don’t get as close to them and if they’re not right there in front of you

Not advantageous for small/mid-size companies with strong cultures. Advantageous for small/mid-size co’s with weak cultures. Large companies obviously benefit, surprised more don’t go remote.

Employees that optimize for promotions and comp are far more likely to churn anyway, as 20% increases are available every 18 months by job hopping.

Loyalty of remote workers is probably a metric more orgs should be considering.

We had a similar survey. 1000+ people commercial FM radio company (so more media than tech). About 20% want to go back to the office.

Remote whiteboarding is challenging.

In the office, we can just make a breakout session and grab a whiteboard and jam something out. We're all present, nobody randomly sounds like a cyborg about to wreck the city, and we can actually get something done rather than have another follow up after someone puts all this into "notes".

Google Jamboard with company issued iPads solves the whiteboarding.

My company has ~600 employees with good diversity in age. Our recent survey showed strong support for work from home. The executives have always been against it, but admitted they could no longer say that it wouldn't work. One executive also said he's grown to like it. They've even started talking about allowing work from home on Fridays once we go back. A lot of folks commute from nearby suburbs, so this would be a game changer for many.

Was it anonymous? Who would want to notify their employer their intent to go remote? Especially a survey that could be to see whos against it.

Young single people are also likely to couple their job & coworkers with their identity & society. So I could see them wishing they could be in the office.

>suited to working from home during the pandemic (young, no kids, etc)

Well that's your problem. Young people are the ones who like going into offices. People with families and kids are the ones who like remote (they have something to stay home for).

I think it is other way round. Young people don't mind traveling to office or at least mind less. They also seek socialization more - whether on the clock or off the clock.

When you have to take kids to school and from school, you feel time wasted by going to office more.

Also, also those chit chats and socialization in the office and after work feel more like waste of time when you are older. When I was younger, it was cool, because when I stayed late to compensate no one except me was affected and I got to look like hard worker anyway. Now, it feels much more like loss.

What I would really want is work full time from the office, but not be judged if once in a while ad-hoc I wish to work from home.

> And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home during the pandemic (young, no kids, etc).

This is the group of people that largely prefers working from the office, IMO.

> And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home during the pandemic (young, no kids, etc)

That seems to be the group of people best suited for working from the office, since they can relocate to live close to work and don't have families to spend time with.

> And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home during the pandemic (young, no kids, etc).

Seems other way round to me. They are exactly the people who would like to come office, chill in cafe, play foosball, and video games etc and their residence may be small and/ or shared with room mates. People who are older would prefer home so they can take care of family also along with work.

Agreed. There is a ton of “things will never be the same” sentiment. That just cannot be true.

I have the same concerns. Personally I liked coming into my office. My workspace was decent, I liked being able to have lunch with my coworkers, and the free food was good. Plus my commute was basically non-existent.

I also have long term concerns about my career. Most of employees were working in the office, and the few employees who were remote, regularly came in for a few days. I was happy with my rent, and I wouldn't want to move that far away. So I wouldn't see much savings in time or money from moving.

> My workspace was decent, I liked being able to have lunch with my coworkers, and the free food was good. Plus my commute was basically non-existent.

If i could say all that, of course! I'd like the office too. I can't

I had mentioned this in another post. I am personally sick and tired out working from home for over 2 months and cannot wait to get back to office. This is probably driven a lot by my role (PM) where you are basically in an endless stream of zoom meetings from 9-5. I get a nasty headache at the end of the day. I also yearn for social connections, quick chats, meeting in an outdoor space etc.

In these times of severe economic anxiety, I'm shocked that 30% of your org were willing to put their necks out like that.

Perhaps you have an excellent company culture. I'm part of an all-remote company, but at prior engagements, I might have cynically read such a survey as a roundabout loyalty pledge.

I'm afraid what workers want is not really important. The pandemics became a huge proof-of-concept for many C-levels execs. The vast majority of them were absolutely sure that if the employees start working from home their companies would fall apart immediately. To their big surprise, that actually didn't happen when quarantine and WFH was enforced by governments. Now they can't stop thinking of WFH as of a huge cost-cutting opportunity.

Nobody asked employees if they wanted open offices or not, it was simply enforced on them. The same will happen with WFH - it will be simply enforced, sometimes with a plausible, good-sounding justification.

In reality - being older with kids is better for working from home than younger with no kids - assuming you have a proper workspace. I really enjoy being able to step out and have lunch with my family, to be home while my wife runs errands, etc. I also live with 5 other people and never really feel alone like a younger single person might. Also as I get older I end up on more conference calls (in management) and its a pain to take them in an open office like everyone has.

From the other responses, it looks like the biggest factor is commute. I am very fortunate to have my workplace 5 mins from home by walk, and I don't see anyone in my situation preferring work-from-home.

“I think it's fair to say that Silicon Valley is dead.” —Altavista founder, 1993

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.folklore.comp...

(Note: Google Groups links don’t work on mobile unless you Request Desktop Site in Chrome)

Interesting, however he did have a point about prop 13.

An evergreen headline...

In the 90s I remember hearing this too. Use the high salary and property value increases to build a nestegg, but keep an eye out for other geographic opportunities because the locals are determined to keep you out, as a class, even if they are friendly one to one.

These days, the property value scam has been going so long that new high wage workers are often locked out for many years, to the benefit of all prior arrivals. But same story otherwise.

One minor difference in the story: a global pandemic

How do you think that will change things this time around exactly?

I think it's already forced many employers that perviously weren't as remote-friendly to move more aggressively towards it. Already we've seen that in a big way at Twitter (see post from 2 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647)

It's simple.

There needed to be an outside force to push large scale testing of remote to convince people to try it. That's the pandemic. It wasn't going to happen on large scale without it.

Now that it's been proven in many fields to be viable, it's got a much higher likelihood of sticking than before.

In the 90s I remember hearing this too.

What, that due to the fact that we're all working from home because of a global pandemic, and my employer says I can WFH long-term, I'm thinking about moving out of SV?

You must run with a different crowd than I do, because I don't recall a single person saying that in the 90s.

The headline is the evergreen part; certainly the specifics are different now then they were back then!

Edit: also, check out Raldi's link to a 1993 post for complaints about housing costs and more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23181981

(That said, the housing costs are far worse now then in 1993 on a wage to land price basis, I hear!)

I didn't pursue a few job options during the 90s in the Bay Area in part because of housing costs and companies that weren't offering enough to cover the difference. As you say, relative prices are much worse now. But Bay Area prices were high even then.

Not sure what the scam is. Sounds like normal supply and demand.

Forcing artificially low housing supply via legislation.

The land values are legit. That they cannot be amortized across many occupants is not.

I get where you are coming from, but my intuition is that we have actually created a massive bubble in land prices by restricting use so much. Land would get a hell of a lot cheaper if we massively decreased demand by letting people live in ways that use less land.

Well there are countervailing trends here: on one hand, land being extra scarce because it is used inefficiently, and on the other, land being extra valuable because it is used efficiently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox is probably the answer: Non-idiotic land use would make the cost of floor area decrease, but the cost of land increase.

Land values in urban areas always increase in response to upzoning and loosening of development restrictions.

That's because we have restricted land use so much that any upzoning is in response to intense pressure, which focuses massive amounts of capital that was waiting on the sidelines to compete for the new opportunity.

If, instead, we hadn't massively down zoned everything in the 20th century, an upzoning wouldn't be "giving away" lots of value, because there would be an abundance of locations that could be used.

This is why small focused upzonings like those that happen in NYC and SF are so disastrous and destroy neighborhoods. Instead of gradual city-wise change like what happens in more affordable places like Tokyo, SF and NYC are super expensive because they set zoning so almost everything is "built out." Any area that is "built out" has reached complete failure in city planning, in my opinion. Which is pretty much all of the Bay Area.

I'm a little confused. Land values in Tokyo are high and have climbed consistently above inflation (post-bubble, of course).

Edit: I should preface this by saying that I'm not an economist, and would welcome nothing more than being able to learn through this discussion, and am quite likely to be wrong on this! I appreciate the engagement.

But housing prices are affordable in comparison to places that have restricted use in less efficient ways.

"Higher" is a relative term, and the question of what the baseline should be is quite complicated. They are also quite variable depending on what you can do with the land; if use is extremely restricted it can keep a plot of land down in price, even while it inflated the cost of land overall in the market.

Land value != property value

Yes, of course, but the high housing costs in the Bay Area come mostly from the cost of land these days. Single family home-owners work to maximize their property values, and though they have made the construction process very expensive, land is most often far more valuable than the structure on it these days. This is quite shocking for most people around the country; when I was shopping around for home insurance quotes probably about a third of the people I talked to commented on how expensive land was. (But not the house, oddly!)

Tokyo seems to be able to do it without an issue. [Edit: I think I was confused by the negatives in your comment, I think we're in agreement]

It’s an incentive problem, and a lot of people are incentivized to keep supply down.

Housing can be affordable or it can be a long term investment, but it can’t really be both.

If a lot of people are desperate to have their property grow in value, they will fight anything that threatens that.

I think it’d be interesting to revoke prop 13 in a staged way. You can either build some large X amount of new housing each year or you can accept a 10% increase of the property tax on your property each year until it reaches the market value rate.

If you’re going to constrain supply you should have to pay the cost.

Though for the same power reasons this could never pass politically.

This exactly. I consider nearly all economic rents a "scam." A land-value tax set to the value of the economic rent would be a great corrective force on this.

The best populist movement ever was Georgism. The ones we have today are pretty awful

The scam is the fact that prices are being propped up by constraining supply. If things get to a breaking point and the State limits the abilities of municipalities to block housing construction then the price of housing will deflate significantly.

A lot of people have moved out.

It's also possible that a thing won't work until it does. Electric cars had that quality and don't anymore, like many other practices and technologies.

Well to some degree it actually happened. All the activity in the first dot com book was in the Valley. Afterwards a lot of it migrated up to San Francisco. Now that both places are saturated. It's starting to happen in the East Bay.

After San Francisco and the East Bay have started saturating, other places were put on the map like Seattle, NYC, Austin and Pittsburgh.

One thing this doesn't mention is the pay cuts that happen if you do decide to relocate to cheaper areas. Both me and my Wife's company have pay bands based on geographical region(most employees know nothing about this and most companies employ these salary COL changes for relocation) and certain regions you can take a big pay cut. Say your salary in the bay area is 100k for example, move to the South, say Florida and it typically drops 30%(typically as low as they chop your salary) so your new salary is 70k, Denver area is 15% paycut etc. These numbers change somewhat from company to company but they do exist for most companies and should be factored in.

What's the rationale for this?

From what I understand, the employee loses leverage. If you don’t like the lower salary, often your only option is another company in your area that will also pay an equivalently low salary.

Hopefully if enough companies start hiring remote workers, our leverage will go up.

I'm not so sure that the leverage will change.

If remote work were to go mainstream and that became the norm, employers won't pay different salaries based on location: they will pay one salary based on the cheapest location. It's not that different from outsourcing work today — there might exist manufacturing workers in the Rust belt that are capable of doing manufacturing, but employers just shift all their supply chains out to cheaper countries, since there's little difference between a Chinese person's labor, and a Pennsylvanian's labor.

Similarly, if everyone is remote, then the difference between employees that live in low COL areas and employees that live in high COL areas starts to really blur. There might be exceptions to this for extremely high skilled engineers, but they're marginal cases.

If we move to an all-remote (or even a "most-remote") engineering culture, then software engineering jobs will simply be "outsourced" to the cheapest COL areas.

I think this assumes all engineers are seen as equal. In some cases they may be. But in other cases companies are looking for good talent. If that good talent can show many remote companies are interested in them, they can likely command a nicer salary. But from what I understand today there aren’t enough remote friendly companies to make that work.

If you're making the argument that good talent will always be able to command a high salary...nobody doubts that.

This "good talent" is not the norm. Google has tens of thousands of software engineers, and only a handful of them (mostly the staff/principal/distinguished engineers) have the kind of negotiation leverage you're talking about, but they already get paid a lot in high COL cities anyway.

True. Very top talent can basically do whatever they want. But there’s a spectrum and I think a wider range can benefit. I think you and I are mostly disagreeing on that.

I think today a lot of “good but not top” talent find themselves crammed into the very crowded Bay Area. I’m hopeful that can be relieved a bit. But I’m being pretty optimistic.

They have to pay more in higher CoL areas to attract candidates -- either ones from that area, or ones who would be moving in.

They don't have to pay more in cheaper areas to attract candidates, so they don't.

I took a substantial paycut at Google when I transferred from the US to Germany, for example, even though I was doing essentially the same work.

It costs someone less to live in a cheaper city so businesses don't need to pay as much to hire workers in that city. The employee's choice is to take the pay cut, or to take a lower-paying job at another company in their new home city.

Currently, the market for location-based labor is deeper than the market for location-agnostic labor, so employers assume that their competition is local - and often it is.

That's less true for the top 20% or so of tech candidates. A person with known skills and a good network can obtain offers from multiple remote-friendly companies today. There's already a location-ignorant market for their skills (probably not at San Francisco comp, but also not at rural North Dakota comp).

As more remote jobs are available, more people will receive multiple remote offers, that is, they'll find a deeper location-ignorant market for their skills. Over time, one would expect this location-ignorant comp to settle around the actual value added.

(Longer explanation in a related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18900072#18903795)

Interesting, thanks for the reading. I am tempted now to get a higher salary in an expensive location, work on-site and then remotely from that location, then quietly move away without telling anyone. As long as my hours are the same and work quality don't change, nobody should be the wiser.

you have to have payroll run in the state where you work

so you couldn't do this without either updating with HR or tax fraud

Cost of living within a state can vary pretty greatly. eastern vs western Washington for example. Spokane vs Seattle: https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/spokane-wa/seattle...

Sorry to be cynical but I assume its just profit driven, keep in mind not all companies employee these bands. For those that do their rationale is why pay a employee more than the region dictates? I think an employee needs to figure out if the COL drop still makes sense to where they move. Say you make 200k in the bay area and move to san diego, which I was told is about a 10% to 15% paycut, you still make 170k and a typical engineer there makes alot less than this, so basically its all down to how bad you want to move to an area and if it makes financial/career sense.

The company feels it can decide your quality of life for you, instead of your compensation. It's kind of unethical (imo) but not uncommon. I'm fortunate that my current remote employer does not engage in this sort of thing.

Most companies agree with the general consensus that SV software engineers are overpaid, at least a little bit. They aren't willing to pay that premium if they don't feel they have to.

Theoretically, if they pay market, they can get someone to take the position. If you want over the market rate, there's a fair chance that someone with similar skills will under-bid you.

Other factors are at play than pure rational economics, though, so that might or might not work out.

In a world where a critical mass of companies that want top talent support full WFH I don't think this will be a huge issue. Google and Amazon already have offices around the country and Amazon's premium for SF/NYC vs all other markets only appears to be ~10%.

Higher income means higher taxes, and if you're in a high COL area, then there's the added expenses.

Of course, if you've purchased a home in said high COL, that could be seen as an investment - and the high mortgage goes towards equity.

I can only talk about my own experience is the living / working in low vs high COL area:

When I live in a high COL area, most my money went towards housing. And while my salary was significantly higher, it was also added stress. I was absolutely dependent on employment, especially the first years. If I lost my job, and couldn't find a new job FAST, then that would effectively mean eviction or foreclosure.

That kinda created extra overhead, knowing that you'd be bound to some work - no mate what - until your house was paid off.

As for living in low COL, it was obviously much less stressful. Jobs weren't as plentiful, but finding a place to live was a non-issue.

The downturn was that you actively needed to invest your money, because you knew that your home wasn't going to appreciate much in price. If you wanted to move from low COL to a high COL, sales from you home or whatever would be pocket change compared to the initial costs of getting started in said high COL city.

But then again, the fact that you could be more selective about you jobs, and getting laid off wouldn't be the end of the world, was def. something that reduced stress.

So purely from a financial standpoint, there are pros and cons to both.

I definitely feel that stress about living in a high COL area. The very large rent/mortgage is always looming. Even if you have a good emergency fund you’ll burn through a ton of money if it takes a while to find a new job should you lose your current one.

I personally have always been against paying people different rates based on geography. if a person offers value, they should be paid for that value regardless.

some people say, but shouldnt their cost of living be taken into account? yes previously, but not when we choose to live where we want. I feel like that whole argument goes away once we are choosing where we live.

that being said, I would expect companies to muscle our wages down using this as an excuse. the good side is that there is financial incentive for companies to give us flexibility, as it costs ball park 1500$/month/employee to have a dedicated office space for them.

But we already pay people differently based on geography...

If you are a software engineer and you show up to work in an office in Alabama, you already make less than the same software engineer showing up to work in an office in Manhattan — even if you are doing the same work for the same number of hours. This is already happening today.

The only difference with remote work is that you don't show up to work in an office, you show up to work in your pajamas and the office is at home.

if you think the difference within a country is bad try being a developer in Russia, India, or China.

Right, based on the value I provide to my multi-national employer, I ought to be able to buy a whole new house every year off of my salary, while living in India. It’s only fair!

> if a person offers value, they should be paid for that value regardless.

That sounds nice on paper, but in practice I guess you wouldn't want to get paid what your equivalent in eastern Europe or Asia currently earns.

As another data point, the company I work for pays the same no matter where you live - from Montana to Hawaii - so it works out favorably for people wanting to live in a lower COL area.

For now. As more companies start shifting to remote work, these geographic based pay rates will only get more widespread. It's always a race to the bottom.

Push back on this.

You deliver the same value from SF or Denver.

They have the budget. They can (and will) pay you.

That works...right up until someone else in Denver is willing to do the same work for less.

The salary needed to afford the median home in San Francisco is about $183,000. In Denver, the salary needed to afford the median home is about $87,000 [1].

What happens when another Denver software engineer is willing to accept what they would have accepted working for a firm in Denver, because it affords them a satisfactory standard of living?

[1] https://www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home-buying-25-c...

And that's true to a certain extent. Especially if you're building commodity software. Or better stated, you're a commodity programmer.

But if you're a talented engineer, you've been on a few large scale projects, can discuss architecture - scaling, algorithms, have a public portfolio, you're in a different group.

The hiring company - their resources are finite. Time from other engineers to screen engineers. The may have infinite applications, but their time isn't infinite.

And if they're going to filter you out because of comp requirements, they will do so in the beginning.

The really senior devs take a long time to screen - so if you've gotten past the high salary filter and have gotten past the really hard technical screens, you now have the upper hand.

It costs a company a ton of time (and money) to let a senior dev with an offer slip away.

More succinctly - if you're a talented engineer, there are companies that will pay a premium for your services. Yes, even SF prices.

Hold your ground on the salary. Take as many job calls as possible, tell them your number. You're filtering them as much as they're filtering you. It's the only way to test if it's too high. Look at levels.fyi, paysa, glassdoor, try to get a handle on baselines and the outlier deals.

Filter out those companies that are trying to hire on the cheap. And then kill it in the interviews with the companies that remain.

There is also a cost to employment besides salary. Every state has their own laws and orgs to register to. (And every country has different social insurance taxes.) This means not only needing to hiring a lawyer to make sure they are in compliance with local laws, but paying an administrator to manage it.

It is not just the employer pocketing wages in LCOLs. There is a cost.

For larger companies; eventually they build out to a point in their main hq or want to provide jobs to get the support of that areas politicians in Congress; that these additional costs for hiring in another state are outweighed by the benefits.

But this can be very prohibitive to startup or even medium size companies. Especially 'slow-growth' ones that do not take VC funding and do not have access to a VC's network of lawyers.

If I move to Washington, with no income tax, but does have a revenue tax(B&O); does my remote employer now have a business nexus within that state? Do they have to pay that B&O tax that Washington levies (is it a tax for national revenue or just from all revenue within the state)? Not a lawyer.

Taking a salary cut, when you also take a bigger cut to inflated property values and taxes; is not necessarily the employer taking advantage, or even a net gain for both sides.

A better argument to me to staying in certain areas like the SV or NYC is losing the ability to easily network and find another company that would employ FAANG level skills. This ability is naturally diminished during COVID and I imagine many companies will take steps to keep their work decoupled from their offices in case another pandemic breaks out. I still do think about it as housing is just prohibitive here in CA where there are local tech jobs.

Yeah, agreed. I don't appreciate this type of race to the bottom. I live in a Low cost of living area, but my work output is not dependent on geographical location. If I do less or worse work than someone on my team in a HCOL area, I would be up for a PIP or worse. I would be absolutely fine with getting paid less, if my company had an expectation of lesser output. But, as it stand, I am expected to deliver as well or better than my peers (stacked ranking). In this case, I do not agree with the lower salary with the same output requirements.

If a company wants to pay less for the role, they shouldn't expect the same output. Geographic region is independent of the work required to be completed.

You should put that theory to the test. Just stop delivering at all if you live in a low COL area until your employer pays you more.

And yet you still gets paid a lot more than your equivalent in a lower-cost country. Yet employees in Europe or Asia aren't expected to produce less either.

You are correct, and I still find that outsourcing to be a problem.

People won't continue making their current SF salary by working out of Farmville, Ohio. I think this point is missed by many

I fully expect Twitter, for example, to come out with salary adjustment policies for people who want to work from home from an entirely different city and state

There are plenty of people who moved out of NYC/SF and continued making their NYC/SF salary while working remotely from Nowhere, USA. Companies who cut pay based on locale will soon see their workforces dwindle to nothing.

This works if you stay with the company you were working for in NYC/SF and then transition to being remote.

I'm always reading about job openings throughout my country (or world, for that matter) that offer 100% remote positions, and initially the huge difference in salary was pretty jarring. Then I hopped on Trulia for some less populated (not rural, but certainly not close-to-the-city-suburbs), and realized the mortgage for a house twice my size would cost the property taxes I pay now. Literally talking about a $25,000/year difference in just the mortgage. In other words, what I pay just in property taxes annually here, is how much a house costs annually that's double the size, there.

Suddenly I didn't mind seeing zeroes falling off the salary.

There's a concept known as operating leverage which applies here: fixed costs, even if high, mean that increases in revenue multiply net income.

And of course by moving outside a greater metro area, you're also saving money by choosing not to consume any amenities of private schools, airports, large hospitals, high infrastructure recreation, etc.

Absolutely true. Once you move out of the center of a high-density, major metropolitan area, you literally cannot find and use private schools, airports, hospitals, and theme parks.

And your IQ drops by 50 points. Instantly. It's weird.

That's not what I said, so your sarcasm is misplaced and makes you seem unnecessarily irritated. Maybe you are misunderstanding the meaning of "greater metro area" which means "a metro area and surrounding, connected developments" and not "better than rural metro area."

I live in northeast Alabama currently, in a rural area, well outside any metropolitan area. Now, I can't speak to private schools; I don't have kids.

As far as airports go, there are two connector airports about an hour away, to the northeast and west, and a major hub two hours east. (As it turns out, even when I've lived in major metropolitan areas, I've never been closer than an hour to an airport.)

There are two regional hospitals relatively close (plus trauma helicopters if you need that sort of thing). Then there are major hospitals an hour west, plus Birmingham and Nashville---both of which I've known people to go to for specialized care.

I honestly don't know what you mean by "high infrastructure recreation"; if it's outdoor sporting and recreation, it's as good here as anywhere (and fishing is better than most).

There is a dearth of bars and live-music venues, but then I didn't partake of those even when I had easy access.

So, when you write "And of course by moving outside a greater metro area, you're also saving money by choosing not to consume any amenities of private schools, airports, large hospitals, high infrastructure recreation, etc." you seem to have a very wrong idea of life outside a "greater metro area", one that is either extremely naive or deliberately insulting.

And I'm not irritated, just cranky.

No, I have the right idea just as you corroborated. There are amenities of legitimate value in a metro area. You do not care for them, so it doesn’t make sense for you to pay for easy access to them. However, saving money by reducing consumption is a lifestyle choice. Many people would rather choose to consume. That’s all I was trying to point out.

There are network effects as well. I live 15 minutes from an airport with daily direct flights to the my parent’s home country. There are only a few such airports in the USA. Places with that kind of infrastructure also tend to have other valuable infrastructure. So even though I don’t benefit from the live music venue 2 blocks from my home, it’s part of the deal of being able to return home on short notice in emergency.

> Suddenly I didn't mind seeing zeroes falling off the salary.

Keep in mind: that asset your company is paying for can be sold and the difference will be kept by the employee, which will let them set themselves up for a much better retirement in a lower cost of living area.

It reminds me a bit of the SF Giants. They couldn't pay high salaries because they had to pay for their ballpark. But the value of that ballpark is part of the value of the club, which would be realized if the owner ever sold it. So it still was a lot like the owners pocketing the money. But not exactly.

This could be dangerous, restarting your life somewhere sight unseen just because it looks great on paper. You sell and move to that house in location x for cost alone, always pining for that life you had in location y with all the intangibles you never realized you were reliant on, and never will make enough to reverse the play and relocate back to y which has experienced ever higher property values since you've been gone.

A better move would be to move laterally, to a place with the same benefits that the one you are in gives you, be it leisure activities or a network for your field. That might limit you to metros, and particular metros that are most favorable to your activities (skiers might like CO, sailors might like FL). Suddenly your options become limited, and you find among these limited choices the same housing issues that have plagued states like CA as demand ramps up, because everyone had the same idea as you. No city in the U.S. actually builds sufficient supply for their influx in labor; even the ones that we applaud are doing quite poorly in terms of how much housing should be built and where. The ones that don't seem to have a housing crisis are experiencing a contracting local economy, and that doesn't bode well with your networking prospects and career options.

Salary based on your locale even though everyone is remote: hilarious. "Oh you live in Alabama you get 60k" "Oh you live in Manhattan on 65th street that is 150k". This will backfire into a political hell.

It's likely there will be a mean remote salary, to remain competitive - i.e. $110K remote and $150k on-site in SF.

If everyone is remote, the salary will just generally be low, period.

Right, that's one strategy, but then that means you lose out on strong engineers living in expensive areas. And since the major tech hubs are mostly very expensive, that means you're missing out on a lot of potential candidates.

What you described is already the case at most large companies, and it has not backfired, so I don't know what you are talking about.

It certainly could, depending on how it's done, but consider the possibility that part of the motivation for allowing people to work remotely is to save on salaries, which are probably by far the biggest expense for a typical tech company.

Gitlab famously does this, is very open about it [0], and in general has enjoyed more praise for their all remote structure than hell for their differing salaries. Maybe the companies won't rush to cut salaries of current employees who go remote and move elsewhere. But I fully expect them to offer new hires different salaries based on their location. After all, they already do that with their non-remote offices. It's not like Google is paying the same salaries to workers in their SF office and Toronto office.

[0] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...

Their SF salaries that anchor this tool seem pretty low. It states $160k for a senior/staff level backend engineer and $185k for frontend.

I would agree. Senior level developers in Virginia, can get 200k as a minimum. The only downside I have found is that companies with high salaries either have more difficult work, or poor work life balance.

I suspect one of the reasons there's not much complaint is that their base pay appears to be pretty high. A senior engineer who lives in South Dakota (either by preference or some life circumstance) is not likely to be too upset about a $100-140k salary.

Get a forwarding mail box from Manhattan and tell your company that's where you live. I mean seriously if the company's gonna dick around w/ salaries like that. I mean other than mailing tax documents is it really their business where you live?

> Get a forwarding mail box from Manhattan and tell your company that's where you live.

Lying to your company about things like that is a great way to get fired.

Everyone should ignore this terrible advice.

It may also be illegal. Don't companies have to deduct and remit income taxes to the state of worker's residence?

Also, it might screw with your tax withholdings etc.

So don't lie, actually have some property. Sublet an apartment with a dozen of your friends for $200/month. Make it back on airbnb. Most companies don't care if you have multiple properties in several states, they'd have to fire all their executives if they did.

You'll end up paying New York income tax too, which is quite hefty.

And you'll not be paying your real local income tax, which is quite illegal.

How people with multiple properties do that?

Such folks normally designate one property as their "primary residence", commonly defined as a place where one sleeps 183 nights out of the year. That's where one pays local taxes.

So it's somewhat possible. Interesting what to do if one have three properties and you 'sleep' in them 1/3 of the year. More complex question about 'digital nomads'. I personally live in one place for many years already. But I'm curious what people do in more dynamic housing situations.

> So it's somewhat possible.

It's definitely not possible to have a mail forwarding box as your primary residence.

> But I'm curious what people do in more dynamic housing situations.

In situations where a primary address is ambiguous based on number of nights, many tax authorities will consider other aspects, such as the address you have listed on government documents, where your family lives, whether you use any of the properties for income or pleasure, where you work, etc.

Also, if you change primary residences, many tax authorities will simply pro-rate your taxes for the period of time that you lived there.

We already do salary based on your locale...

If you are a software engineer and you show up to work in an office in Alabama, you already make less than the same software engineer showing up to work in an office in Manhattan.

The only difference here is that you don't show up to work in an office, you show up to work in your pajamas and the office is at home.

If you are up-front with this, it's just a salary offer that people will take or not depending on how good it is. No problem.

Companies can do this because so few of them hire remote. If it gets normalized, the practice will not be sustainable.

Companies with offices in multiple regions have done COL adjustments for many decades without any issues.

Gitlab's compensation calculator will show you how much less or more you can expect to make based on where you live (if employed at Gitlab, of course)

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...

If people leave SF and NYC rents and COLA should fall.

Or alternatively they could just decrease salary across the board and those who want to stay in expensive areas are out of luck.

On the flip side, if VCs decide their money is better spent in Provo or Austin than SV, there might be a move toward wage equilibrium.

20 years ago, tech was still a toy to the average person and lawyers were the ones in high demand.

The thing about markets is that they communicate relative scarcity, which tends to bring new people into the market.

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

"Rent is way too high in San Francisco!"

"So move somewhere else, maybe?"

"But I won't make as much money!"

Well, there you go, then.

For reference, GitLab are fully remote and publish their rationale [0] for paying regionally-adjusted salaries.

Some of the arguments I don't really buy (for example, I don't think you need to hire anyone from very high cost of living areas to build a world-class engineering org at GitLab's scale) and others (e.g., the golden handcuffs argument) I think are just a consequence of fully remote teams currently being rare. But it's still interesting to see their rationale.

[0] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...

This isn't anything unique to remote companies. This has been standard practice for a very long time at companies with a presence in multiple locations, for the same reasons.

True, but I'm not sure that's equivalent. A company that employs onsite employees in a high cost of living area is demanding that they pay higher rent as a condition of employment and should bear the associated cost. It may still make sense for the company to bear that cost even if it's solely the employee's choice to live in a high cost of living area (e.g., for the reasons GitLab mention), but it's much fuzzier for remote employees than for onsite employees.

I don't think companies have ever done COL adjustments out of altruism. It's because of market effects.

If you pay Kansas rates for an employee in NYC, you're not going to get qualified candidates. This doesn't make a difference if the employee is driving to an office or not. Both remote and and onsite employees live somewhere. When you hire someone in NYC remotely, you're also competing with employers onsite in NYC, paying NYC rates. If there's anything that results from the shift to remote, it's going to be that companies hire fewer people in high COL locations.

At the same time, GitLab services are NOT priced per region. Neither cost of the IPhone or Telsa is discounted in the region of FarmVille, Nowhere.

The price of products does often vary between regions when their is a regional explanation for the difference in price. iPhones and Teslas are priced differently in different locations, as are many many other products and services.

Iphones and Teslas indeed priced differently, most of the time they cost more in the places with lower purchasing power. I.e. compare cost of Iphone in Eastern Europe and US.

It's the same thing, "COL adjustment" is just phrased from a different viewpoint.

Both are simply regional adjustments for the price of a resource. That resource could be a product, or it could be labor.

That's kind of my point - there is no 'universally cheaper' place. However on every discussion high salaries are explained as a result of higher rent. Yet no one would apply the same logic for other things, like in Easter Europe cars are expensive - here is your car price adjusted salary.

Transportation costs are typically factored into COL calculations. Rent is the #1 thing people bring up because housing is by far the largest component of COL expenses for the vast majority of people on the planet.

From first principles, the value gained from paying top dollar for SF based engineers is their talent and their being in the environment of SF -- the tech capital of the world. If everyone is working remote, then the environment aspect of the deal disappears and all that's left is talent correlating with salary.

Based on this assumption, I think it's actually more likely that the Staff level engineer at Twitter who moved to Kentucky for a lower cost of living will still be making the same range of salary and the SWE 1 in SF would make significantly less.

How much of a paycut is acceptable for a given drop in COL?

Ex. SF to Dayton, OH: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cost+of+living+compari...

If your bills were cut in half, what percentage pay cut would you accept?

Personally, I wouldn't accept a cut. However, depending on how the employer calculates COL, I wouldn't be surprised if pay for new hires follows in lock step.

It doesn't scale as simply as that. Imagine you were making $100k with $60k in expenses in the Bay Area. That means your discretionary income is $40k. Then you move to Ohio and make $50k with $20k in expenses. That's $30k in discretionary income.

So, even though the Bay Area is 3x more expensive, and you're only earning 2x the salary, you're still taking more money home at the end of the year by accepting the job in the Bay. In this scenario you need to look at absolute cost, not relative cost.

(Obviously there are also other factors to take into account like quality of life, etc - but that's highly dependent on the individual)

> It doesn't scale as simply as that.

My question fails at the lower end. I was imagining 200-300k Bay area salaries. Is that reasonable?

It seems like if you want to move to a low cost area, there is a salary that is smaller but provides you the same discretionary income.

It must be tempting to make even a short-term move out of the Bay area. If your lease is coming due and you were planning on looking for a new place anyway, why not move back in with family or get a short-term rental somewhere further out. Rents will likely be going down over the next few years, not up, so it's a terrible time to lock yourself into a new lease. And we can expect re-opening to happen slowly, so there should be plenty of warning for most workplaces before you're required to be in the office again. Based on my Zoom calls, my co-workers have been fleeing the city, moving back in with parents, moving into parents' second homes or picking up vacation rentals on the coast or in the mountains.

I live in SF but rented a vacation rental for May and June. No point to live in my 600sqft condo when everything is closed and I can rent a 2000sqft house with a pool for small change.

I'm planning to do the same. Put things into storage and get a better view. Any advice finding a place?

Check airbnb, vrbo, craigslist, or if you're looking at a vacation hotspot, local realtors often do monthly vacation rentals. Monthly rentals are often much cheaper on a per-day basis than weekly rentals. Your SF rent is going to go extremely far just about anywhere else. I am renting a 2br vacation house on the beach for less than the price of studio.

VRBO caps the platform fee at $500, but on airbnb it's uncapped. I messaged several listings directly to see if they would offer a discount for a longer stay, and several said they would.

If you are going to do this, I would first get it cleared with management because if you are moving states, it will change what state taxes they will have to pay for employing you.

Christy Lake, chief people officer at Twilio:

> “It’s probably not great business practice to pay Bay Area comps in Michigan,” Lake says. And when it comes time to promote, would those employees have the same opportunity to advance as everybody else? “We need to think proactively,” she says.

So, in case anyone is applying to Twilio, heads up, I guess.

The market will take care of itself. It works like TCP but negated. Companies will drop the offers until the hiring success rate tanks, and then slowly creep it up until they get the headcount they need.

The question is, what kind of offers are the remote candidates living in Dirtcheapville, MI going to accept?

To be fair -

I used to live in Ohio and my parents and I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment that cost $600/mo about fifteen years ago. You could buy a 5 bedroom house for $250k. The school district I attended was also top notch. It was a great family area and I remember the mall, rec center, and numerous parks.

I checked zillow recently and 5 bedroom homes are ~$300k and apartments are about $800/mo.

At the time, my dad was the sole breadwinner and he was earning about $40k a year.

I'm out in California right now making a comfortable six figure salary, but I can't really afford a 1+ million dollar house in a good area where I can send my future kids to school.

If I was earning even $100k a year, I could comfortably afford to live in that Ohio suburb about 15 miles from a major metro.

So if you lived in that Ohio suburb, your code quality would be reduced vs living in California?

I don't think my code quality would be reduced by location. If anything, I'd probably have less stress and more time to learn and improve. Making software and learning new stuff is pretty much a hobby, and more time to devote to hobby would be awesome.

Personally, I have not ever worked at a remote-friendly company. If the tides were to change and facilitating remote work becomes a first class priority, then I don't see why I couldn't thrive. My biggest irk right now is we can't just have ad hoc breakout sessions with different stakeholders (product, ux, eng) and come to quick conclusions. Zoom meetings are horrible, and I'm not really sure which tools are great for easily whiteboarding ideas. Someone recommended Google Jamboard.

Another concern moving inwards would be that I lose access to the hordes of other like-minded individuals who love technology. I won't be getting the same quality of meetups there for sure, since the area isn't a tech hub.

I'm going to take an unpopular/wrong sounding opinion and say it's possible. If you leave the bubble filled with world-class programmers, techies and entrepreneurs, it's possible your code quality will be 'reduced' because you don't see the value in it as much compared to taking care of your kids, building up your local community, etc. Peer pressure is important and if your peers are teachers, cops, store managers, etc would you care more about learning the ins and outs of the newest JS framework or about what dishes to make at the BBQ you're throwing this weekend?

If you were able to afford a $250k house on $40k/year salary, why can't you afford a $1 million house on a "comfortable six figure salary" (if, presumably, that means at least $160k/year)?

Because everything else is also more expensive in California.

Way higher taxes. Gas costs double. My car registration fees for two cars was over a thousand dollars. The houses you can get for a million dollars have 3 small bedrooms, dated interiors, and pathetic back yards. If you want to live in an area that's safe and has good schools, you really need to pay a huge premium. A friend of mine purchased a 3 bedroom house that's really nice, and his down payment was almost as much as a house in Ohio. I do love living here, but it isn't really a fair comparison when it comes to housing. The houses I am mentioning in Ohio have acre plots, and large rooms.

If someone was to make less money in Ohio than their counterpart in California, I would say their dollar would stretch more in housing. Right now, even though I make decent money, I still live with house mates. I park my cars on the street, and I've had to deal with numerous crimes (bikes stolen, car registration stickers stolen, someone stole my bike rack, etc.)

FWIW I'm not the kind of person to trash California. I think there are still a lot of merits to living here.

Also my parents couldn't afford a house there, and still don't have their own home. We were immigrants here, and our experience in Ohio was honestly a really good one with a supportive community.

This is going to be the reality for every company. Bay Area salaries are what they are because of the local talent pool. You're not going to get that living in Ohio.

Another thought: those workers and their companies could contribute to changing the situation in Silicon Valley and the rest of California: https://cayimby.org/

Without a change in housing policy in the US, this just becomes a big game of musical chairs:

Guy moves from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon. Portland gets too expensive for some other family, who move to Boise, Idaho. And so on...

>Guy moves from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon. Portland gets too expensive for some other family, who move to Boise, Idaho. And so on...

Yup. It's a fundamental values problem that can't be fixed without a major ideological shift. A large number of people do not believe that people have the right to do more or less whatever they want on their property. Until that is fixed you're always going to have people saying "but you shouldn't be able to build that there".

Maybe the endgame is that these tech megacorps just do it themselves and build their own cities on empty land.

Google just killed off their condo project. I'm fine with leaving the company town in the past, though. We need more public housing, and less private land speculators.

Another option could be that living in a big city becomes less necessary.

People flocked to these cities in the first place because they were seen as sources of social opportunities (jobs, venture capital, social networks). I would like to see the Internet disaggregate those opportunities.

I've worked remotely, and for creative, collaborative work, and chance meetings and that sort of thing... I still think offices and cities win.

"In 2013, Yahoo Inc. decided its lax policies on working from home had prevented it from innovating and required everyone to come back to the office."

-- and now in 2020 Yahoo is an innovative power house...

Just have to be more innovative than the counterfactual, which was probably the case.

I feel like most of HN is missing something here, of no fault of their own because they're not in my demographic (20-something yuppie). Young people want to live in cities. They're fun, exciting, and enable a robust social life. Moving to rural Ohio or Michigan, or even a "lesser" metro in the midwest is not the same as living in SF or NYC in terms of social opportunity. I work remote and I live in Brooklyn and I think its great. I don't need a car or a big house. But unlike most of the commenters here, I don't have kids or a wife. Essentially, I put my money towards a better social life.

I'm not saying that my way is better, it's just that the whole "move to a big cheap house in the midwest, bro" line that HN loves to throw out is not for everyone.

What do you get in SF that you can't get in Des Moines? I lived in Des Moines until last year and I find most answers to this question are wrong: you can in fact get it in Des Moines. Sometimes Des Moines is even better, though I'll admit in most cases the vastly smaller size limits quantity of choices.

Diverse younger people from all around the world that are trying to reach their full potential.

You get that in Des Moines. Not nearly as many but they are there.

I have nothing against Des Moines so I'm trying to tread lightly here but I have a hard time believing someone from say London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, or Sydney would move across the world to end up in Des Moines at even a fraction of the rate as New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. It's a fine place, I'm sure, but it lacks global pull that would bring in talented people from all corners of the earth.

I agree there isn't much global pull. That is the point, even without any global pull there is a diversity of people in the city. Not as many as SF by any means, but on a small scale it is there.

Yes but is SF really worth what you pay for it?

Also most of silicon valley is a boring suburb no different than what you can find anywhere in Texas or Florida.

When I read these I feel its way to early to start making determinations on whether "Working for Home" is here to stay.

It's going to work for some and not for others, but a few exceptional months with no clear forecasts on what happens next makes long term decisions terribly difficult. I'll be fascinated to see how this workout for Google and Microsoft coming into Q1 of 2021 compared to how things worked out for Yahoo! when they banned working from home a few years ago.

I may be more of a bear on this than most on here but I don't think working from home is going to be quite as successful as many think.

"[Living in] a one-bedroom rental in South San Francisco, a short commute from Facebook Inc.’s offices in Menlo Park"

-- might want to edit the "short" part. I think that's at least a 1-hour commute, EACH way :)

Meh - people are going to be experiencing a wake up call in a couple years when they lose that job and need another. I really doubt remote based jobs will go up in income now. I expect them to fall - if anything. (Increased supply of workers wanting to go remote cause housing too expensive in big cities - can you imagine how many people are craving a bigger home now?)

Can't imagine how devastating it will be when you see your household income fall from $500k+/yr to $200k/yr. Junior ain't going to private schools anymore.

Living and purchasing a home in a very high COL city feels like a marathon. You know that you won't have paid off your home until many decades later, and you need to maximize your earnings, while minimizing your risks of becoming unemployed. In other words, it can motivate you to become really good at something, but at the same time inducing a lot of stress.

Living in cheap areas, feels very different. I recently move back home, and could pay off my home with two years worth of salary. That's it, no mortgage or anything - just the occasional renovations / upgrades. On the other hand, now that I'm not chained to a mortgage, I need to invest more of my money - in the case I want to move back to somewhere expensive.

Job market isn't anywhere near the same, and salaries are much more compressed. Mid 6 figure salaries are unheard-of, unless you own a company. But it doesn't feel like a rat-race, where you need to hustle all the time.

If even a smallish fraction—say 15 or 20 percent— of the workers who could move and work remotely do so, that could have a pretty significant impact on local economies. Even if wages adjust some, you’d still see essentially a redistribution of wealth from highly concentrated areas to those less so. A shift of say, 2 percent in apartment vacancy rates is nontrivial. On the whole it could be a net positive, for individuals and for stressed cities.

1 in every 5 employees relocating is a huge proportion.

The pairing of working in an office with a hellish commute is a bit odd.

Maybe SF really is a parallel universe. Here in the UK, basically anyone earning a tech salary can afford to live within 10-20 mins cycle of work, even if they want children.

You won't have a home with a garden and all the rest of the knick knacks, sure, but that's a different discussion.

Most techies in SF could afford to live relatively close to work, or without roommates, or both.

The reason why they don't is still due to the high rent though. When living with a roommate or two, or living a bit further away means you get an extra $1000+ a month to spend on other things, that can be very enticing.

This suggests that it's not only just that rents are high, but also that the current housing stock is not configured for the type of demand (small homes for few people, instead of large homes for lots of people).

Yeah, I tend to agree. A lot of young people happily live in group houses; I suspect a lot more would if it didn't mean compromising on floor space or bathroom availability.

This isn't true, at least of all the tech workers I've worked with. None of them could afford to live within a 30min commute of a downtown SF startup.

That sounds rather implausible, given the average dev salary in SF and the existence of BART.

For example, living in Daly City would give you a ~30min commute, and the average rent there is $2,500, so $30,000 of post-tax income annually. High, obviously, but certainly doable on most SF dev salaries; Hired says the average there is 145k gross, so perhaps 100k or so after tax: https://hired.com/page/state-of-salaries

I can see how this would be true for a ramen-stage startup but it’s not true in the normal startup job market where engineers get paid six figures. Lots of good places available downtown for <2k per bedroom. If you don’t want a roommate you can get a decent small apartment for 3k or a lower-end place for 2k in other neighborhoods. You don’t need to leave the city, and you don’t save all that much by doing so anyway. Good neighborhoods outside the city are also expensive.

One good reason to leave the city would be if you prioritize renting a house with a 6000 sqft suburban lot, which you can’t find in the city. Another would be if you have kids and want a good school district.

I am moving from San Jose to Michigan on Saturday. My company has allowed me to continue working remotely. I know of a few others doing the same.

Care to talk about your motivations? Why Michigan?

Mostly just for personal reasons. My wife and I are both from there and our family is there too.

First, these are NOT normal work from home times. This is currently the worst time to experience what work from home is truely like.

Second, if your job requires a lot of face to face interaction them WFH will NOT be a good fit.

Third, if your org tries to do remote communication in the same way it does place based communication. It will not be a good fit.

BUT, if remote communication is first class citizen, conditions are back to the normal state of 4 months ago, your job duties are well suited to individual creative contributions, work from home CAN be a great fit.

People are going to be moving Mountain House or Reno at farthest, not Cleveland. Though the thought of buying a literal mansion near Boise with your techbux is amusing.

Mountain House near Tracy? I don't think I've ever heard of Mountain House before.

Don't get me wrong, it's kind of a weird planned community in the desert. I only know it because my coworker moved there and had a 1-2 hour commute into San Jose.

Idaho has been receiving a huge influx of Californians.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-10/go-back-...

https://www.idahostatesman.com/opinion/editorials/article237...

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-millennials-are-moving-f...

Yep. I think the overall migration as been: Bay Area -> Seattle -> Boise -> Nevada?

Desirable areas will always be (relatively) more expensive. Even if we see significant deflation (which is unlikely given the scale of money printing), these areas (NYC, SF) will probably remain expensive so long as they remain significant culturally and economically. When it becomes uncool to live in SF or NYC, then perhaps people will move to places like Wyoming en masse.

The cultural amenities of cities are in serious jeopardy, generally. Many of the restaurants, clubs, theaters, museums, bars, etc that make the city a desirable place may never reopen.

Sure, but that's likely only temporary. And if it's not, then we probably have much worse things to worry about than which cities are hip.

Restaurants and bars require very little capital to open (the low barrier to entry explains why margins are so low in the industry). Even if many of the existing restaurants go out of business, new ones will quickly open up once the pandemic is over and people start going out again (which might take a little while, to be fair).

They'll all be replaced. Theaters, for example, will rebound because they're still sitting there, even if they need a new owner. The demand for food, drinks, and entertainment will still exist, even if it's reduced somewhat, and the costs of opening a business and low competition will make for some very tempting business opportunities for entrepreneurs.

These are also the same cultural amenities that make a rural area desirable (what's really left after you've listed everything). These businesses are far more likely to come back in cities with different investors, they may never open up again in rural areas.

Silicon Valley and San Francisco are two different things.

Most junior people in Silicon Valley live in cookie-cutter apartment buildings smack in the middle of a vast wasteland of anonymous subdivisions. Pull up some satellite views and take a look.

That's not desirable. It's just expensive.

I always lived near work, mostly with roommates. It's definitely possible to do, you just need to be willing to figure out a way. I would rather have a short commute than anything else, plus I prefer living with other people.

Thats something that has always amused me about the peninsula (other than SF). Other than the weather there really isn't anything remarkable about the place.

Parts of Wyoming (Jackson area) have actually been having lots of people (relatively) moving there and is now surprisingly expensive.

Perhaps Wyoming wasn't the best example, but I was looking for something very sparsely populated and WY fits that bill.

For the 20-30 something with no kids who are showing higher productivity working from home, once the outdoor/social life returns to normal, their productivity will drop.

They will want a dedicated office space and discipline of going to an office to reattain that productivity. As a solution to this, we could have lots of satellite offices for people to come in and work but teams are still distributed and remote to each other. This could potentially maintain productivity levels as well as avoid high rents and horrible commutes.

This could work only if everyone is still remote to each other relatively. The moment a few of the team members are co-located in the same office, they start having in-person meetings and can collaborate in person, that stark difference people in office vs people remote will emerge. Then it all falls apart.

It's not just about the rents and finances. Escaping Silicon Valley is also escaping a monoculture. Yes, the Bay has diversity in one sense (for example ethnic backgrounds), but in other ways (diversity of thought) it is very uniform. Urban living is also just one way of living. It's not the way everyone wants or needs to live, and those who want more breathing room can seek that out if they can work remotely. Politics also vary by geographic location, and those who are tired of issues like SF's lack of law enforcement and constant problems with homeless drug addicts have more viable alternatives now. Those who have families/friends in other places will be freer to live near them. I think this is going to be great and hope to see all tech companies adopt remote work.

Do you really think you're escaping "monoculture" by moving to Ohio?

It would at least be a different monoculture. And depending on the city, even less of one as East Coasters are fleeing their own respective sky-high rents to Ohio:

https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/ex-new-yorkers-are-flocking-to...

I think people are imagining this will be pretty plug and play, but there will be a shock for sure if your standards of living and expectations come from larger and more diverse metros. I grew up in Cleveland, and lived in those listed areas in Columbus. They feel small, like very small. The 'active' walkable part of Columbus is like 2 miles on high street, where home prices are the highest and continually higher with every year. North of this is Ohio State, which I love but it's a weird place to hang out if you are over 25 and a football game isn't going on. South of these two miles on high street are downtown, which is empty after 5pm because it's all state government buildings and offices, and the german village which is admittedly quaint but not worth uprooting your life for imo, every city has a cute older area with $5 lattes. The rest of the city is suburbs stretching out until it blurs with farmland, indistinguishable from any of the other suburbs. Most of them don't even bother building sidewalks they are so dependent on the car. Public transit in Columbus is crap, basically a pity gesture from the city saying 'yes, we do have buses' and that's about it.

Cleveland is an overall nicer city than Columbus. It has older bones and is pretty well laid out on the east side with a few RTA rail lines. There are a lot of older neighborhoods that date to when Rockefeller lived here and made his fortune with Standard Oil along the riverbanks. You can get a mansion for ~$75k a bathroom right on the RTA line in Shaker Heights. The metropark system is also enormous.

However, Cleveland never recovered from white flight. The population of the greater metro area has been stagnant for 50 years, while the city proper has lost half its population in that time. Despite the good bones, Cleveland feels hollowed out as a result, and there is a lot of space now devoted to surface parking lots that used to be an apartment building in a formerly lively neighborhood. Still, there are a lot more walkable neighborhoods than Columbus and more options for living, but the city isn't growing nearly as fast as other metro areas and will not shore up the damage done to city life from white flight in my lifetime imo. I'd say about half the people from my high school class still live in Ohio, the rest took better positions elsewhere.

Coupled with the limited number of employers and therefore lack of jobs, and the six months of depression (sometimes it would only snow once or twice, the rest of winter everything will be grey and brown and muddy and dead, and 'scenic' autumn only lasts for like two weeks anyway), and I haven't looked back since moving west. In terms of my career, physical health now that I can be more active outdoors all year, and my mental health (Cleveland in particular only gets 80 days of sunshine a year), this was the greatest decision of my life. Plus I can actually get proper ethnic food, you should see what they call a taco in Cleveland. If I want to visit, can't beat a 5hr direct flight.

Thanks for a very comprehensive description. It's a good response. Maybe Pittsburgh compares better to Cleveland?

Another way to look at it is that a web of many economically viable locations and ways of living produces a diversity of thought/perspectives in aggregate, whereas grouping everyone up in a few places leads to dominant and stale monocultures.

I left a decade ago. And my standard of living went way up.

Where'd you go, if you don't mind me asking...?

Midwest, college town, house in the country on 80 acres.

My kids grew up, they could walk around outside all day and still be at home. They could invite friends to visit, do projects, shoot, saw, drive carts, dig holes. All three are Eagle Scouts, Engineers, black belts.

Wife and I have 7 gardens plus landscaping projects. Two sheds 20X50, tractors and implements. Orchard.

All for less than that old house in San Jose.

Good to hear you're happy

Incredible. I wonder, how different were sub-cultural an social aspects, versus the Bay?

I'm considering it. But I am pretty sure that once things open up, my office culture is going back to one where all the important decisions get made in the hallways after a meeting. Being remote in that scenario means you have no say, and you miss out on important information.

Being the only remote person on a team is really hard. I’ve both done it and been on teams where someone else does it. It’s less than ideal for everyone. It’s a constant nag that never goes away (oh did you remember to join the hangout for Matt?) and pretty much no matter what you miss out on a good deal of communication. I definitely think remote would work best when everyone is doing it.

I'm really concerned about this. My Bay Area company is planning to go back to the office soon, but my kids are still home so I need to be home to help out with the child care. I'm one of the only ones on the team with little kids at home, so I'm going to be "that guy" that they have to remember to dial in. Hopefully the schools will get back open soon but it's not looking real good for that.

Sounds like process needs to be changed on a higher level, not that an ever-growing population needs a slavish devotion to sitting in ever-growing levels of traffic.

Anecdotally, it surprises me how many people are still buying homes during the pandemic.

Region-wide, prices fell 2.9% in the Bay Area in 2019; it "feels like" prices merely held relatively steady, and the selling prices I'm seeing the past month or so are on track with that.

I know this article focused on established players, but I'm curious what the pandemic means for early-phase startups based out of SV and NYC. When every sales pitch and networking event is a Zoom call, you lose any benefit to taking expensive space in a Mission District incubator.

If aspiring founders leave the city (even temporarily), they may still find success, but are they going to relocate back to the pricey areas when it's safe to open up?

I've spent the last 5 years hoping for a catalyst that moves tech out of the two biggest players so it can actually help stimulate different regions of the US. Maybe the quarantine will finally trigger this

I think a big factor to Silicon Valley is VCs wanting in person meetings with founders and to have in person board meetings. If VCs realize they can take pitches and do board meetings over Zoom they can start investing outside Silicon Valley and startups don't have to start and then stay here.

This could finally help solve the housing crisis in many of America's large cities. Every employee who moves out frees up one apartment for everyone else. 30,000 employees leaving is equivalent to building 30,000 apartments.

The number of tech workers in the bay who have zero roommates is a lot smaller than you seem to think.

Yeah, one of the reasons I left. A 30 year old with a 100k job needing roommates is absurd.

"But the trend raises complicated questions. If employees move to a less expensive location, should Twilio adjust their salaries accordingly? “It’s probably not great business practice to pay Bay Area comps in Michigan,” Lake says. And when it comes time to promote, would those employees have the same opportunity to advance as everybody else? “We need to think proactively,” she says."

I wouldn't sweat it. After the pandemic has died down, companies will be requiring everybody back into the office and all those people moving to Montana will be packing up again.

Maybe companies will be forced to open offices in Billings if everyone is moving to Montana.

I left SF a year ago to settle in the midwest. Best decision I ever made.

> Just as people can work from anywhere, employers can hire from anywhere. "The talent pool gets massive," he says. "Why would my employer pay me SF wages?"

This is sort of a non sequitur. These calculations are already happening and becoming more common, regardless of whether some individuals choose to move or not.

It's my hope that many people do move away though. Even setting aside the horrible traffic and insane housing costs, it's just not healthy for the region to be so highly dependent on tech jobs.

I can't think of anyone in my office who wants to permanently work from home.

We talk about it every week, and it's become clear that everyone is looking forward to the day where offices reopen.

I really don't see this trend of people relocating. And for those considering it, once they are made aware that salaries will scale with location it's probably going to be a strong enough deterrent.

How about competition, the biggest reason they got 200k+ a year was their location. Now they will start competing with the non SV market.

An honest question: isn't this what local governments want? I see cities and counties implement two policies: rent control, and blocking development of high-density residential areas. Both measurements will limit supplies (while benefiting incumbents), so naturally people would move away.

Yeah, I'm an at risk group for this thing and I'm not commuting into an office for the foreseeable future, my office has been good so far but if they don't make an arrangement with me to continue this when our half baked state reopenings happen then I'll find a place that will.

One interesting side effect is that local schools are already seeing declining enrollment as families can't afford to live here. I have hear rumors that my local school district, CUSD, may have to close a school and reduce staff because they don't have enough students.

I'm certainly daydreaming about this, as someone living in SF right now. But IMO things are still too uncertain to pull the trigger on making a huge move. And I wonder if the likeliest scenario, is that everyone strongly considers doing this, but then we all slowly get used to the "new normal" and by the time it's clear one way or the other what the future is starting to look like, we're past the peak of the virus (maybe it's early 2021 and there's a vaccine starting to roll out) and everyone just kind of settles back into mostly the same life they previously had due to inertia.

And anecdotally I've heard very few people say they now want to stay fully remote forever. What I've heard instead is people talking about how they hope that 2-3 days a week in the office might become the new normal. That might open up your options a bit, maybe that makes you willing to commute 1 - 1.5hrs instead of 30 min - 1 hr. But that wouldn't allow anyone to leave the metro area. In fact, maybe this scenario actually increases cost of living because now you need to both be close enough to downtown to commute a few days a week, and have enough space for a dedicated home office so you can work from home productively the other few days a week.

The Bay Area arguably doesn't lend itself as well to a part-time WFH situation as other cities do. Given that it's not just the core city that's expensive but the whole peninsula where most of the jobs are located and even most of the surrounding areas. You can get out of it with a long enough occasional commute--though then you're probably also too far out to regularly take advantage of urban culture, etc.

By contrast, somewhere like Boston assuming the jobs are even in the city (many aren't), a drive that's 60-90 minutes depending on time of day puts you into pretty reasonably priced exurbs.

> In fact, maybe this scenario actually increases cost of living because now you need to both be close enough to downtown to commute a few days a week, and have enough space for a dedicated home office so you can work from home productively the other few days a week.

I agree completely. Like, I decided to live in a small apartment downtown Vancouver because the office is really close. To be comfortable working from home, I need a bigger place with an extra room. Either I go back to the office, or I move away from downtown and don't go back to the office.

Would be nice if a lot of these soon to be vacant commercial properties from small businesses become botique office space a la wework, but direct from the landlord so there isn't any additional parasite to feed. I'd love to have a desk right in the neighborhood I could walk to from my apartment with my laptop and plug into a couple of monitors, I'd make my boss pay monthly for that.

All I need is table space (which I lack in the apartment) and a couple $100 screens, maybe a printer and fax machine to use once a month and once a year, respectively.

Well for those who stay, the rent prices might plummet if there's enough of an exodus.

A lot of people came here to comment "you won't make the same salary". Yeah no kidding, but the ratio of salary/COL will be a LOT higher regardless. Don't believe me? Check the chart in the article.

I welcome anyone trying to leave SV to come live in beautiful Southern Oregon. Great weather, not too crowded, and still drivable to Seattle and the bay. Come help build our little tech scene!

If a company want to hire remote workers, why do that in US or Europe?

Time zones are closer, cultural fit, communication style fit, easier travel and onsite when necessary, more familiar tax schemes.

My company hires a lot of Croatian software engineers. Most of them speak great English. 1/3 are very, very good, 1/3 OK, 1/3 literally terrible. But we rotate the bad ones out and keep the good ones, and the rumor is they cost about 1/3 or 1/2 of an American worker. I honestly feel that the American software engineer may be in trouble if remote really does take off -- 2 solid Croatian guys for the price of 1 tech bro is a very good deal.

I expect to see a lot of companies doing this. You read the same exact docs whether you live in SF or Bulgaria. If anything you have better math skills outside the U.S. which helps you more than a language barrier would matter.

Some might argue the best engineering is here, maybe that's correct maybe not, but companies rarely want the best. They just want the cheapest possible tool for the job they think they have. If a remote dev is significantly cheaper than a U.S. based remote dev, no business will be paying that premium.

It's worth mentioning that none of our tech leads are outsourced. All of the very demanding architecture work and decision making happens here. A lot of that yields a spec that needs a hundred hours of dev time -- for example, "update the iOS and Android apps to match the redesign we did on Mobile Web". You don't need a US based engineer for that type of work, but you sure as hell want the best possible guy designing the architecture and doing code review.

Link to article: http://archive.md/dhoUk

And I'm considering to become a billionaire this year. So what?

This is constantly brought up on HN in the WFH threads.

Your employer cannot arbitrarily reduce your salary. The reduction has to be agreed upon by the employee or the employer has to terminate employment and rehire to reduce salary.

Very few big tech companies will update salary for a intra country move. It seems to happen most often when an employee relocates to a new country rather than a new state. This is because the new country requires a different work agreement and must follow different labor laws.

Are you sure about that? Everything I read says an employer can reduce your pay without reason at any time. Can you elaborate?

> Your employer cannot arbitrarily reduce your salary. The reduction has to be agreed upon by the employee or the employer has to terminate employment and rehire to reduce salary.

There might be state regulations to this effect -- and IANAL -- but there's no such federal law in the US. An employer can cut an employee's pay at any point to any value above the minimum wage, as long as they inform the employee their pay has been cut.

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