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Comment by gringoDan | Hacker News Reader

Remote work. 20 years of progress were consolidated into the last 3 months.

Previously, you saw people living in hubs like SF and NYC for the high salary and high prestige jobs. But when those jobs are available from anywhere, all of a sudden the "lifestyle cities" like Boulder, Boise, Chattanooga, etc. start to look a whole lot better. You no longer have to sacrifice the high-prestige career to live in a lower cost-of-living area with access to outdoors activities.

This is going to exacerbate the divide between the haves – who can bounce from city to city, chasing the best lifestyle at all times, enabled by their remote work – and the have-nots, who are tied to one physical location because of their jobs.

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I am really skeptical of this idea that suddenly people will be moving to small cities. For one, this assumes that people just move to big cities to work. Is there any research to prove that ? For most people, especially when they are younger, people gravitate to big cities for all the amenities that come with the big city living, jobs being one of them. So in essence, it is jobs chasing people into big cities, rather than other way round.

It's older research, but this work [0] found that when choosing a city to move, roughly 65% of moves were based on employment and housing (cost, proximity to job, size, etc), and only 25% came from desirability (neighborhood, crime, amenities, etc).

They also assessed the difference in motivation between low-income and high-income movers; the role of desirability was reduced to about 17% for low-income moves, which seems to make intuitive sense since they are less likely to have the luxury of basing a move on less-economic factors.

The authors also observed a trend that younger and more well-educated movers were more likely to choose an urbanized destination, but not by too much (single-digit percentages). In contrast, marital status and whether or not you had children were substantially more influential.

I didn't do too much digging through the followup work, so I can't say anything conclusively about changes in these trends over the last 30 years.

[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1467-9906...

You don't move to the city until you have the job (or are already the wealth to do so).

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It's anecdotal, but a few of my team members have been making moves out of Seattle. I can only imagine the life they can live in other cities on a Seattle-salary.

Nearly everyone I know on my team moved to Seattle for work. I'd say less than 5% are "from" Seattle.

Fresh out of college, I moved from Lubbock (small town) to Dallas (big city), again, for work. Moved from Dallas to Seattle, again, for the job not "for Seattle"

It is first career for me then I saw all these art scene and food and stuff but that I can lose.

It’s kind of both. More people in smaller places means more of the amenities and lifestyle of bigger cities without the cost and hassle. Will there be a massive outmigration? Probably not sufficiently to make NYC a ghost town, but it could absolutely turn second and third tier cities into places where a lot more people want to live. There are a sufficient number of people that move specifically for jobs, but would be happy to live in a smaller place. Even if that’s 5% or 10% of professionals, that’s still a huge impact on the communities they move to.

For an N=1 sample, I'm a younger person who moved to the Bay just for work and chose as out of the way of a place as I could find to live. If I had found a comparable opportunity nearly anywhere else I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

I did wind up liking it here and have a preference toward staying, but starting every morning with a swim in the ocean and having plentiful hiking opportunities is much more of a contributing factor than the city amenities.

I'm in for an anecdote. I moved to Manhattan from Upstate for work, primarily. Transit being present and inexpensive takeout options are important when starting off a career ;)

As a 30 something, single developer in boulder, if I knew my current job was going to be remote for the long haul, I would leave this place in heartbeat for some tiny town in Wyoming. Boulder and the rest of colorado have become entirely too crowded.

You can get most of what you need in a large town or a small city. I live in a large university town; we have malls, movies, some of the best fashion in the country, every kind of food but no Michelin restaurants, excellent education and schools.

Compare to the big city (Kuala Lumpur) where there's... zoos, opera, symphonies, IKEA, nicer restaurants, libraries.

The offices are there because they're near to rich people homes. The rich people homes are there because they're next to offices.

The city has few parks. Parks are kept clean by shooing away anyone 'loitering', so there's no real leisure spots in the city except malls. It takes half an hour to get to a supermarket because of the traffic, weird highways, and another half hour to find parking. Delivery startups took off, but only in the big city.

This might not be the case with say, NYC, but it's probably similar in many large cities like Jakarta or Bangkok.

It's no coincidence that the highest paying jobs are also in the heart of traffic jams - you'd need to pay me a lot more to commute there and even more to live in such a noisy, polluted area.

The podcast Pivot has a host who has referred to Coronavirus as "the great accelerator", meaning trends that were grabbing hold have only sped up under the pandemic. Remote work is definitely one of those.

I'm curious if your last paragraph holds true or not. The same thing was said about "digital nomads" in the freelance space. While it certainly got a lot of headlines and made a lot of people have some wonderful fantasies (myself included), the realities of being a digital nomad really kept the trend from taking off. Family, friends, a social group, the desire to put down roots... these are things pretty ingrained in society and are hard to overcome for all but a very small number of people. I wonder if COVID forcing remote work to the mainstream will actually increase the number of digital nomads (as per your last paragraph) or merely lead to a revival of small-sized (but more lifestyle-oriented) cities like your second paragraph speaks to.

If I had to put down a bet, I'd bet on your second paragraph (people moving to smaller cities) and bet against your last paragraph (people moving readily and consistently). I'd bet that it's not the job tying people to a city, but rather their social group.

you don't have to be a digital nomad. We've been living in a rural'ish city (Cedar city, UT), that isn't a tech hub for awhile now. I'm a freelance dev (underpaid probably $40/hr).

But, I like living wherever I want, and not having to move. Plus wife's family is nearby which comes in handy.

I think one big thing though about the have-nots divide increasing is this is going to speed up automation unlike anything we've seen before. Walmart is already testing getting rid of cashiers completely.

Remote work I think (and hope) will end the big cities / tech hubs and make people move further and further out and be more rural, and keep remote working growing..

Check out Robin Hanson's Twitter. His hobby horse recently has been finding _any_ evidence that total employment is affected by recent automation and he's not really finding any.

How about stagnant and declining real wages and decreasing income security for most people?

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf

When in SE Asia, it's common to see 20 staff in a store the size of a 7-11, while here it's one or two. (Note that most are unpaid interns, but then I'm the only customer.)

So the US has already minimized the number of unskilled staff relative to some other countries.

Ironically, tech companies often have a shadow engineering organization of 10 or more customer service engineers per company sitting around waiting for an email to help onboard a new client.

Sure, there's always more work to be done.

Technological progress in production, like automation, reduces the proportional costs of labor, thereby accelerating inequity.

Because surplus (profit), not siphoned by management, goes to the investors (providers of capital).

This has always been true.

Some notable exceptions are profit sharing arrangements, like early Walmart, Microsoft, etc.

(Edit: Toyota too. They explicitly reward Labor for productivity improvements. I don't know if that's still true, generally. More recently, Haier has their own unique strategy for innovation and empowering labor. I'm super keen to learn more about them. I have no idea if they share the surplus more fairly. Of course, co-ops explicitly share the surplus; can't believe I forgot about them.)

Seems to me that everyone, everyone, is determined to not see the pink elephant sitting in the living room.

Paul Krugman is maybe closest, with his theory that "job stealing robots" is a convenient cover story for decline of Labor.

Like how Big Timber deflected blame for job losses onto the spotted owl away from automation.

Removing cashiers and automating checkouts just frees up the staff to focus on other in-store work. But the biggest benefit is higher throughput for checkouts. Self service checkouts or automated checkouts free up space for more such counters.

> Removing cashiers and automating checkouts just frees up the staff to focus on other in-store work.

The supermarkets are functioning fine which leads me to think that there isn't a whole lot of other in-store work waiting to be done if only more staff were free to do it. Automating the checkouts just reduces the levels of staff that you need.

store pickup items is one way. and some can do their own small delivery

There is another angle when it comes to this "remote work revolution" - does it really matter for employer if remotely working employee lives 200 miles away or 10000? Not necessarily. And oh yes, there are plenty of solid and skilled potential employees around the world who will work for fraction of current SV salaries. It looks like widely appraised "disruption" might be coming to SV as well ;-)

Time zone differences make talent in similar time zones more preferable.

But I agree that SV will get greatly affected in a detrimental way by remote work.

You’re right about remote work — but your take on “have and have-nots” is disturbing.

Curious, could you expand on "lifestyle cities like Boulder, Boise, Chattanooga. In which US states are the Boulder, Boise, Chattanooga you are talking about? (there is several cities called with those names in the different US states).

Not the OP, but as I live in a "lifestyle city" (Knoxville, TN) there are several middling big cities that are in close proximity to activities (hiking, climbing, skiing, beaches, etc).

Pretty sure the cities the OP was referring to are Boulder Colorado, Boise Idaho, and Chattanooga Tennessee. My family prefers Knoxville due to it being closer to the Smoky Mountains, but Chatannooga was on our list when we were deciding where to live.

Thanks for explaining it! I didn't have also a clear grasp of the term "lifestyle" and "lifestyle city". The term life-style does not have a clear semantic meaning understandable from just the word 'life' and 'style' but it seems like it has a very specific meaning attributed culturally by people in the US (or maybe generically English native speakers).

Boulder, CO is about a hundred times more populous than the next one. I was unable to find another city named Boise. The most populous Chattanooga is about 400 times ahead of the next. It is obvious which cities are being referred to.

I am from Europe. In Europe is very uncommon for two cities to be named the same across two different countries/regions. Clearly if I'm asking such question it means the answer is not obvious to me. To you and the other 3 persons that downvoted my comment: You are implying there is such thing as a stupid question. You should know better.

I am from Europe as well, but I'm not sure how relevant that is. I regret using the word "obvious", I should instead have said "it can safely be assumed that it's the city that's much larger than the others that is being referenced".

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