Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them | Hacker News Reader

Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them

wsj.com

171 pointslxm282 comments

I own a number of pieces of property in Whitefish Montana, where I decamped to the second my children were released from school for COVID reasons in March (we split time between TX and MT). Given what I felt were going to be significant economic disruptions due to unemployment and drops in income, I prepared myself with the understanding that our little resort town was going to be facing some hard times. Usually, small resort towns tend to take it on the chin when the economy turns.

Boy was I wrong.

Once the initial shock of lifestyle changes happened due to COVID, people FLOODED the area and any piece of real estate not bolted down was flying off the shelves and bought for cash unseen. I sold a small lot in the Whitefish City limits for a significant capital gain, after buying it for what I thought then was at the top of the market in 2019. I've been offered cash for home-run-knock-it-out-of-the-park prices for my retirement home property that are simply unfathomable. The only reason why I don't sell is because I treat this property like I do my two labrador retrievers - everything has a price, but I'm not interested in selling. :)

There is a lot of angst in Whitefish over the changes - all the building and influx of money really helps the local economy, but the quality of life (traffic, etc) is suffering. It's the age old dichotomy for a small Montana popular town.

I don't live in Whitefish (nor Montana), but I love it - it's such a cool town!

What do you think about Bigfork as a place for future investment/growth?

I think that most of the towns in the Flathead Valley all have good potential - they are all nice little enclaves

Your experience could partly be explained by selection bias (e.g. sister comment “it's such a cool town!“). I am presuming you didn’t choose Whitefish randomly, and obviously you must have been an early adopter.

However, the flight to other locations does seem like a general trend. Anecdotally it appears to be happening to my neighbourhood...

i just bought 18 acres on the direct border of the Ouachita National Forest in SE Oklahoma for reasons outside the pandemic (i live in Dallas, about 4hrs away). The real estate person said all land is gone within days of listing. They're selling at $7-8k/acre what was $1-2k/acre just a couple years ago. People are flocking to the country side.

I don't think it's a permanent move though. People are buying summer/weekend homes or property which already had constrained supply.

i agree, i think people are buying but then will sell and head back to the city eventually. Living out in the sticks is ok if you understand what you're getting in to but many don't. However, I think it will have a lasting impact as many urban people are going to have at least some real world exposure to rural life. It may broaden the perspectives of both urban and rural types... or drive them even further apart.

I'm sure there are a combination of factors.

With prices of most assets inflated and lots of money flowing around, land speculation is probably a significant factor.

Lots of folks are probably looking for security but will turn around and sell once things stabilize or they realize that property ownership and living in the country come with responsibilities they're not equipped or willing to handle.

I loved Whitefish when I was there, and would have considered it for the long term but was concerned about reports of a growing alt-right contingent in town. Have you encountered that?

Whitefish is exactly the opposite of your concerns. It is very similar to the "Austin" of Montana.

> labrador retrievers

Lovely dogs! And yes, everything has a price, but of course you might decide something is not worth being sold (I am referring to the house, not the dogs of course!)

People have been talking about this on HN for a few months now, and I never took it seriously since these threads are always filled with people quoting numbers saying it's not happening.

That was until last month, when two tech workers from San Francisco moved into the neighborhood.

Both have the same story: Their company went work-from-home when the pandemic started, then made it permanent, so the company employees are fanning out all over the country to make better lives for themselves.

Now I look at all of the new California license plates I see around town and wonder.

I never thought of my little corner of nowhere as a better place to live. I only moved here because it's cheap and as far away from as many other human beings as I can get while still being near an international airport. But maybe it will work out for them.

Good luck to the new generation of digital nomads.

That's what makes it appealing to a lot of people who have been living around millions of other people. Soon many of these places will no longer be cheap and far away from other people. It'll be interesting to see how today's cultural conflicts play out when the more left-leaning, urban remote workers move en masse to smaller, more right-leaning, less urban places.

It's not about left right. It's about rural vs urban and have money vs not. Everything that's terrible and soul crushing about a tourism economy is about to happen to random places that have thus far been spared that fate.

You can't reduce things to one dimension, I agree, but I disagree that left vs right is unimportant. When largely liberal city people migrate into largely conservative places, there's gonna be some conflict. Not to mention a lot of these tech workers are liberal and have money, so they'll be empowered to support changes that the locals may not be on board with but also may not have the means to combat effectively.

I agree with your first two sentences, then I think you loose your way.

SFO is a 'liberal' city, but the idea the tech people are majority liberal as well needs a strong does of supporting evidence. My own observation is that much like the rest of the rest of the populace, it's a spectrum. I have talked to many SFO folks looking to move out of there specifically because they want to be somewhere 'conservative', usually using more colorful language.

And I also have some doubts about the whole 'techies are going to come here and take over' trope. Sure, they will influence things (money always does), but entrenched political and social structures don't just melt away overnight. They know the rules of the game because they made them. I live in a pretty lefty area that's also pretty desirable to live in, and periodically you'll get an influx of individuals from other places that make noise about some aspect of the area that isn't conservative enough for them (taxation, commonly) and how they're going to change things. And the incumbent political actors spin up and work the system and it usually goes nowhere. I suspect you'll see much more of that than radical changes brought on by the arrival of tech money.

You only have to look at any slightly politically charged topic on HN to see that there are plenty of far far right wingers in tech.

Edit: see I'm even being downvoted by them now :D

Many techies are individualistic. That used to be considered left-leaning, but in the last years some people have been pushing the idea that is something from the right, instead.

We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.

Do these individualistic people wear masks or is that to collectivist?

That’s the dealbreaker question for me right now.

Point being, even individualists are part of a community.

Obviuosly. No one is an island. I should have said "individualistic-leaning".

Appreciate the response. Sadly not obvious to all these days : (.

> It's not about left right. It's about rural vs urban and have money vs not.

There's a high correlation between population and political in the US:

> There's a decisive break between Democratic and Republican support at a population density of 800 persons/per square mile.

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-01/how-the-d...

Also, in recent years/decades there has been high correlation between education levels and political leanings. Piketty, in his most recent book Capital and Ideology, made an interesting observation: up until the 1980s blue collar works tended to vote for more-Left parties and white collar (more educated?) workers for more-Right parties. Then in the the 1980s and 1990s it swapped to the point that the more educated you are the more Left-ish you are likely to vote. And this phenomenon is true in basically all Western countries.

The biggest trick the media has played on the working class is framing everything in a "right vs left" lens.

There does not seem to be any resistance to this indoctrination.

One thing worth remembering - thousands of current "Bay area tech workers" grew up in other parts of the country, and moved to silicon valley primarily for job opportunities, but may not otherwise share in the religious, political or social views that dominate that space.

So while in some cases there may be the conflict you're alluding to, for other people, they're just moving back home.

That's precisely the math that people are weighing. Live in comparative squalor in the bay or nyc in your cramped apartment with no grass and no light and little opportunity for change as time goes by and your family potentially grows, or move back home and live like an absolute king in a legitimate mansion with yards on all sides with a three car garage, basketball hoop, and a pool in that rich rich neighborhood with better schools than SF. It's like giving yourself a massive raise.

Don't you see that this is the kind of framing that rubs people the wrong way? There's nothing wrong with having different preferences, but it's frustrating for Bay Area natives to constantly hear that it's a terrible place nobody could enjoy on its own terms.

Ironically, people in "flyover country" have been hearing the same sorts of disses for decades

Absolutely, and I won't pretend that's something I've never been guilty of. But it's a very toxic habit and we need to do our best to fight against it.

I used to cringe with the term “flyover country”. Now I embrace it. I even promote it. The less enticing I make my area seem to an outsider, the less likely they will try to move here and ruin it.

There's nothing to do here, you're isolated, there's no culture, it's completely boring, and the people are so intolerant. Stay on the coasts!

And don’t come to Louisiana either, WWOZ is on the Internet for a reason!

(just kidding, we need all of you we can get)

I mean sure, but eventually you come to a reckoning of what you truly get out of an area. Is it nice restaurants? Bars? Parks? You can have those elsewhere. Walkable neighborhoods with transit exist elsewhere too. Museums, art, plays, concerts, operas, orchestras, too.

At some point you have to square with the fact that your 2 million dollar home in the bay area is an order of magnitude more expensive than a comparable home in a dozen more or less comparable places, given that you'd be working from home at the same rate anyway (in this hypothetical). And then you'd have plenty of money left over to fly back to the bay whenever you'd like.

Can you give some examples of places that meet those criteria (good transit, walkable, major cultural venues, varied dining scene) with $200k houses?

I don’t think there are many places in America with good transit that are walkable so I think it’s going to be tough to find that for $200k. And if the solution is just to move somewhere so small you don’t need transit, then you lose out on the varied restaurants, cultural events, major airport, etc.

The better places for transit like NYC, SF, Chicago, and Denver are all major cities so you won’t find dirt cheap houses near the transit.

Shaker Heights.

Chicago: the Red, Blue, Green, Orange, and Pink lines all run through neighborhoods with $200k houses. The Blue Line connects to O'Hare, the Orange line connects to Midway. The bus system has a line in a grid every mile, sometimes more often, with some diagonals.

Are the areas with the cheap houses walkable destinations in their own right or mainly residential communities with a subway stop that can get you to the action?

Chicago was the example that most came to mind as something with cheaper houses and transit, but without knowing it very well my sense from talking to people is that there is a lot of cheap housing in Chicago but living in the urban core isn't necessarily cheap.

How is it terrible? While I'd love to move to a cheaper place (our work is all remote now), I can't think of anywhere better and I've been looking hard.

Being near the ocean is a hard requirement. And weather that isn't terrible (bay area weather isn't actually very good, but it's also never terrible). Where else could one go?

Florida could be nice but it is low land being taken over by rising oceans so not a great strategy. Washington state coast sounds promising but there is snow up there, so a hard no. Oregon coast is pretty inhospitable for water sports. Southern California isn't particularly cheaper. Southern east coast (north of Florida) could work, but way too much racism so as a minority that's a pass.

SF Bay to Monterey Bay is a sweet spot in the USA that is hard to beat.

I would consider it a personal problem if a bay area native dislikes hearing that some people don't like the bay area. Is it unreasonable to expect adults to have the emotional maturity to handle such things?

Space in big cities comes at a premium, but tech workers living in SF have hardly been living in squalor. Most of SF is single family homes, and the vast Bay Area beyond even more so.

Also, having done the spreadsheet many times myself, it’s almost never a raise to move to a low-cost area.

The reason people make that move is that they’ve accumulated so much wealth in SF that they can basically retire so long as they move to a low cost area.

Some people want to do that, and retire very young. Some people don’t, so they stay around until they’re wealthy enough to even afford nice properties in the bay area.

The reason for this giant shift, however, is very simply that the vast majority of city life is either closed or greatly impeded at the moment. So the experience of city life has been significantly degraded, and thus many people are now shifting toward places that offer very little except for nice, cheap property, and thus make a good place to hole up and hide out the pandemic.

I’m not so sure - housing is so expensive in the Bay Area it’s more than just moving to retire.

I grew up in Buffalo where housing is quite inexpensive so it’s more dramatic for me, but a small house to raise a family is 2.3 million on the peninsula, super old, pretty small (1600sqft), and being a new buyer your property tax on that is 23k per year.

That’s insane even if you get a million dollars in an exit or in google shares.

People just want to be able to have a family and a place to live.

My friends mostly left in their 30s to have kids (mostly Colorado, some Texas).

Even SF is cheaper than the peninsula for a new construction apartment (which don’t really exist in Palo Alto through Cupertino).

You can’t even really escape to Santa Cruz anymore - you’d have to go to Sacramento. At that point you might as well move across the country.

Frustrating bit to me is how unnecessary this is - just people who bought first protected by prop13 keeping the supply down for others.

There’s an irony in seeing people with a Black Lives Matter sign on the lawn, and pushing for No on 22, but when it comes to the most important way to actually help the most people (increasing housing supply) - they instead repeatedly argue against building new or high density housing. And they do this while pretending they’re in favor of housing at the same time.

One of the Palo Alto city council members says there’s no housing crisis - you just need a good realtor (like her). See: https://twitter.com/lydia_kou

Kitty on the planning commission in Cupertino says if they build housing single devs will turn their high school daughters into prostitutes.

People complain about building everywhere, but the housing policy/cost is abnormally bad here.

I’m in Sacramento, been here a few years. There’s definitely been people moving from the Bay out here. For some people, you can buy a large enough house with a yard, but you have the option of driving in to the Bay if you need to go in to your office from time to time, while mostly working remotely. Certainly not the perfect option for everyone, but it works for some people.

I agree on the need for more multi-family housing. There’s been a boom of apartments and condos around Downtown and Midtown Sac, but they are all “luxury” units with the price tag to match. People not making a good salary don’t seem to be helped at all, so there needs to be more policy than just “build more rich people housing.”

But then again I was one renting a “luxury” apartment before I bought my condo in a gentrifying neighborhood, so maybe I’m part of the problem.

Increasing supply matters more than policy around what specific housing is built.

If you increase supply (even if all “luxury”) - older units become cheaper relative to new units. The supply is the most important bit.

Affordable housing policy is often pushed as a way to not really increase supply. They’ll build one price controlled housing unit that’s nearly impossible to get an apartment in and call it done.

> thousands of current "Bay area tech workers" grew up in other parts of the country, and [...] may not otherwise share in the religious, political or social views that dominate that space.

I know a few, who grew up in rural Michigan, and Oregon, respectively. But from conversations with them, I get the impression that, while they carry some traces of their roots with them, they also have much that sets them apart from their background (putting a high value on formal education, cultural tolerance, etc).

And ultimately, Bay Area values WERE formed by the people who moved there. Janis Joplin? Texas. Nancy Pelosi? Maryland. Donald Knuth? Wisconsin.

I think you're both right, and it just goes to show you that (in spite of what it might feel like sometimes) we've all actually got a lot more in common than we think. I'm a mountain-states native who went to the Bay for work and is (at least for now) back in the mountains. I got along fine with folks in California, but it still never quite felt like home (tough to do in a 1BR). Still, I'm sure I've brought a little of the Bay back with me! At the very least a new Subaru with California plates. :)

I like to flatter myself that the Bay Area has changed me from my rural roots; surely there is some of that happening too?

The dispersal of bay area tech workers will be good for the country, if we can avoid breaking down in the immediate future.

SV had become a total thought bubble, with the average tech worker having either no conception or a very negative conception of how most of the country lives outside of the large urban areas.

Moving into areas with lots of moderates or conservatives will be a good learning experience. I don't expect people to change their ideology, but I do expect much more tolerance from them than what I've seen in recent years.

I grew up in an area with conservatives. I remember the slurs I was called quite clearly. I don't need to go back to that experience. Give me a break with a comment like this.

Nearly all my colleagues and friends here in the Bay Area are from somewhere else.

So this idea of a totally isolated bubble is a fiction made up on few facts to sell a story.

And most people are fairly tolerant - except of the intolerable few who wish to destroy tolerance. Again more made up stories.

It's a pretty massive thought bubble, at least for the professional class. It has a massive number of highly paid, white, left-leaning people. Opinions outside of that bubble are met with "I didn't know people like you existed!".

If that's not a bubble, I don't know what is.

The Bay area and tech is not predominantly white. While hispanics and black people are underrepresented, Asians (both south and east) are dramatically overrepresented.

In addition, Bay area people are from all over the country and from diverse backgrounds.

In contrast, rural communities tend to be highly homogeneous both in terms of race and life experience.

An exception doesn't disprove the rule. Go walk around any upper income neighborhood in SF. It's mostly white. Sure, Asian make up a good percentage, but it's mostly white at the upper echelon.

And sure, people come from all over the country, but they gravitate here because the SF bubble aligns with their own views. And if your views don't align, you learn pretty quickly to keep your mouth shut.

And sure, rural communities have their own issues, but you can have a much more diverse perspective going to any number of "fly over country" cities in the US.

According to Wikipedia, the 2018 ACS estimated SF is 40% White, 5% Black, 34% Asian, 15% Hispanic, and 5% mixed race.[1]

Are you really surprised that sharing a party with white nationalists makes you an outcast in a city as diverse as San Francisco?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco#....

Of the US population 80% lives in urban areas. While bubbles are relative to experience it is fair to say the higher percentage is the one more representative.

Small cities and suburbs of large metro areas (which account for a large proportion of that %) are very different culturally.

Where are you?

So...uh... whereabouts is that exactly? Asking for a friend.

I'm guessing from his twitter somewhere within range of Las Vegas.

Another thing I'm curious about is what the distribution will be like. Smooth, across a wide range of places - anywhere with a decent internet connection - or will people follow previously trodden paths to places like Boulder or where I am in Bend, Oregon? There are plenty of towns with lots of outdoor access in Oregon that are cheap because the mill closed. But they are not 'hot' destinations.

if starlink comes online as scheduled then all bets are off. You'll see tech workers on the mountain tops of the Rockies i bet.

I'm not so sure. People like to be around other people, and like minded people. Sure, some will go to really out of the way places, but I'm not so sure about how many will stay, long term.

the right model for the rockies (and cascades and sierras) is to be found in Switzerland/Austria/France/Germany near the high Alps. In the long run it's not going be urban development all the way up to the summits, but I would expect the Rockies to have more of the same sort of human presence that the Alps do in about 1-200 years time. The big difference is precipitation ... the Rockies are on the low side compared to the Alps, and that may take things in a very different direction.

Wait till Asia's borders open. The fanout will go transpacific. Especially in Southeast Asia.

Except time zones

Even better. Play during the day, work at night. ~Most~ Many engineers prefer that.

So right now it's 5pm PST, end of the work day for many. It's 8AM in Saigon.

You really think people are going to work from midnight to 8am? And sometimes later in the morning depending on the situation? And this is going to be a massive trend?

If your company can operate on EST, yeah, the hours almost work out. Lines up even better on India Standard Time.

For PST, central Europe is perfect. 6pm-2am workday is pretty doable.

The GP said "Especially in Southeast Asia," not Europe.

6pm-2am is doable if you're a) a very late night person, and b) without kids. I don't think this generalizes to a large percentage of people, and it can easily go well past 2am. It's less unreasonable to think people may still be working or responding to something at 8/9 or even 10pm PST, but if that's now 4/5/6am for someone in Europe, that's pretty rough. You'll also not be able to line up your meals very easily.

Definitely not for a large percentage of people. Just a significant percentage of the IC engineering workforce. Especially the digital nomad types.

People with kids aren't going to relocate their family internationally unless they already had family roots there.

Anecdotally, the people I personally know that love SE Asia and would seriously consider or already did WFH from there were all in the 20-30s age group and had no problem maintaining US working times. The biggest draw of SE Asia other than the super low COL is that its beautiful outside. The outdoors is best enjoyed during daylight, so the timezone offset is a plus for them.

Maybe not Saigon, but as a night owl, it's been a dream of mine to be able to slide my 9-5 EST jobs to being 2nd shift jobs, like say in Central or Eastern Europe.

People have different biological clocks, and being able to detach from geography and perfectly tailor your clock to the company's clock, frankly, sounds like good efficiency to me.

Lots of companies operate across two or more time zones. Yes, it has problems, but as long as you group them together in no more than three groups it generally doesn't get too complicated, and even allows you to not have to have people on call at odd hours.

And salary changes and income taxes.

I saw a great quote recently that said something like “Everyone loves work from home until you lose a deal to the competition that turned up to your customer in person.” There’s an element of truth to this.

Best advice I’ve heard is to say the draw for living in a city may go away but you need to be close. Living in the middle of nowhere isn’t going to look like such a great idea when people start gathering together again. Maybe not as much as before, but it will still happen. For these reasons I see why the suburbs are seeing a real estate boom in many areas. I’m much less sure about the long term move to places much further away from the cities.

and the people that survive in the denser environments will - by nature - be more fit to acquire goods and resources

so its unlikely that everyone in their remote prepper bunker will remain competitive just because we have video phone in the 21st century

> I saw a great quote

I recall that being in Matt Levine’s Money Stuff (I did a search for it, however I didn’t find it.)

Not everyone is a salesman though. Why would an engineer need to be in an office coding away so "he can turn up to his customer"?

Your customer is the person handing out raises, promotions, key assignments, etc. The person who makes it to happy hours will have the edge, fairly or not.

Raises, promotions and the like are not the way these days to make significant chunks of cash. It's job hopping every 1.5 to 2.5 years. In this case, there is no need to worry about promotions.

IME junior engineers benefit from being physically around senior staff, but that's just anecdotal.

I got more from reading the source code of Emacs, Ultrix, Dynix and TeX,then eventually NCSA Mosaic and Linux than I ever did from almost any other "senior staff" that I ever encountered.

I would hope the same is true of the comparison between reading the source code of Ardour and meeting me in person.

You live in the middle of nowhere and appear on Zoom calls. The rest of your team meets with company leaders in person. Who do you think has the best relationship with the leadership? Not saying it’s impossible to do this remotely but when others don’t it becomes very very hard. Applies to everything, not just sales. Full remote works until someone breaks the chain, then everyone working remotely is at a disadvantage.

The way to rise in your career is to work on a string of high-value projects, not to slave away on the same codebase for years. When a VP has a great idea that needs a prototype delivered in 2 weeks, who is he going to go to? The engineer in the next office who he sees in the microkitchen every day, or the engineer working 2 timezones away who he never sees and doesn't know exists?

I think remote work will be a great option for the next 2-3 years, and then once the pandemic has receded and folks start switching from fear to greed mode, there will be distinct advantages to being near people with large budgets.

To add on top of that, what about just general travel or business travel?

I could understand moving away from the bay area, but living in a remote town has it's costs. Need to jump on a plane for a business meeting? Well, now you're driving 2 hours to the airport and then connecting to some hub.

I've done it in the past, it adds a ton of friction to travel.

Reducing wasteful polluting plane travel is a bonus not a bug.

The "space" dimension is so overrated when it comes to meetings.

If that is the only thing that has been keeping cities together then they're doomed.

Assuming you remove all "wasteful" travel, you're still causing more pollution living away from a major hub. Instead of a non-stop SFO to JFK flight, now you're taking a 1 hr Uber (or driving yourself) to a local airport, then taking a connecting flight to SFO.

You're still in a bubble. Taking a flight for a business meeting is wasteful. Full stop.

You’re clearly extrapolating your own experience to everyone. And have never done sales.

Doing meetings, serious meetings, over Webex sucks balls.

If your some developer who never has to talk to anyone, then sure, your unproductive team meetings don’t have to be in person.

I wonder when the reverse will happen. As rents in SF dive, will people that were force to outlying parts of the Bay Area return? Will younger LGBT folk be able to afford to live in/near the Castro? Will more people _not_ in tech be able to live here?

SF has felt like such a one-industry town for quite a while, and that can mute some of the richness and diversity that normally makes cities interesting (and perhaps more broadly valuable?). If some tech workers are happier in the mountains, that's great that they can now live that life and keep their jobs. But I hope that in their places, we see a new diversity of people of range of jobs who can choose to live in a city that was previously out of reach.

SF rents are still ridiculously high. The city don't be more diverse until it becomes a real metropolis of several million people.

For about 30 years cities were relatively undesirable places to live in for the average person. The cities that young people have flocked to in the last decade or so are designed and developed more like large scale open shopping malls than the cities of the 70s and 80s.

The closest comparison to what's happening now was "White flight", a largely racist reaction to the civil rights movement involving increased protests and riots in cities. White flight changed many cities in the 50/60s, in particular Cleveland, Oakland and Detroit. These cities only started to see any kind of revival in the tail end of the last economic boom. For decades cities struggled with violent crime, racial tensions, poor infrastructure, etc.

What we're seeing is a much larger scale than that and will likely change cities for decades to come. In the shopping mall era of cities you live in cities because you are close to work and close to restaurants, bars and other things to do. And cities feel remarkably safe. Nearly every tech person who "loves cities!" today would feel very uncomfortable in SF or NYC of the 1970s.

Virtually every one I know in a major metro is considering leaving because: jobs no longer require being there, pandemic has destroyed much of the food and small business scene, and cities are becoming visibly less safe. The people are moving to other areas and they are very often looking to purchase a home rather than rent (since what you can get for the same mortgage as your current rent is typically an order of magnitude more space). This means they won't be coming back soon. This will cause a feedback loop that will continue to force employers to go remote, reduce the number of restaurants and leave cities more vacant and more dangerous.

It means the city will also change very rapidly and be much less attractive, even at a lower price.

But to your point about the Castro: it's precisely because "average" people didn't want to live in SF that marginalized groups found a home there. The Castro in SF, the Village in N YC were places that Engineers didn't want to work and live, so artists and outcasts moved in.

My fear is that this collapse is going to be too extreme and too fast to allow for the creation of this interesting space of possibility that NYC and SF of the 1970-80s was. The collapse of commercial and residential real estate in these areas is going to have consequences that I think are very hard to predict right now.

I don't see how your comment is at odds with what you're replying to.

> cities are becoming visibly less safe

Hm, I do not think this is true.

It's true in LA at least. Petty crime is unenforced and people are well aware of that fact. I've seen people smoking crack or shooting up in broad daylight plenty of times this year, sometimes in front of city workers who do not care. Seems like there is an assault or a stabbing or shooting every day in Hollywood now. People getting drunk every weekend playing with guns on Hollywood blvd watching some other drunk dumbass do donuts at the intersection and the LAPD doesn't care. 17 year old bystander was killed at one of these events in the summer (1). Yesterday a 70 year old man was killed in Venice when someone tried to steal his bike from him (2).

It's been getting worse the last couple of years, but noticeably more amped up since covid killed a lot of foot traffic and therefore community surveillance that seemingly kept a lot of this belligerent behavior in check. Not sure how things are going back east, but it's getting pretty gritty over here.

1. https://abc7.com/hollywood-shooting-street-race-fatal-teen-k...

2. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/73-year-old-man-die...

Not enforcing petty "crime with a victim" is a SoCal thing. You don't really have those issues in NYC, heck even in Baltimore, Newark or Trenton the cops won't pass up an opportunity for an easy arrest if they see someone prowling a bike rack with bolt cutters (and it won't be catch and release either, it'll be enough to make that kind of thing not worth the risk of doing flagrantly)

Regarding the public drug use and other publicly visible low class behavior shenanigans, there's a large portion of the public that just DGAF.

> Baltimore, Newark or Trenton the cops won't pass up an opportunity for an easy arrest

Don't know about the others, but this is not true of Baltimore.

Honestly, the largest predictor of how often I hear about "rampant, unenforced crime" seems to be the proportion of people in the city who moved from the suburbs and are unused to cities.

> Regarding the public drug use and other publicly visible low class behavior shenanigans, there's a large portion of the public that just DGAF.

I'm one of them - visible poverty is sad, but it doesn't make me fear for my life or feel like more jailing is needed.

To me, as someone who grew up in a Baltimore-adjacent city, SF just seems like a city full of people who are city-inexperienced.

> Petty crime is unenforced and people are well aware of that fact.

a. The evidence just doesn't back up that enforcing petty crime in some way makes cities safer. Peaks of petty crime enforcement were in periods like the late 80s and 90s, which were when violent crime exploded.

> there is an assault or a stabbing or shooting every day in Hollywood now.

b. Crime statistics also don't back up the idea that violent crime is much worse now, especially when you consider the fact that we're talking about a comment comparing with the 80s/90s.

Do these things occur? Yes. Is it much worse than it has been historically? You've provided no evidence of that. Is it something likely to happen to you? Not really at all.

We ended the war on drugs and "broken windows" policing for a reason - it had huge negative impacts on people caught up in it and didn't actually succeed in making people safer. It would often create cycles of policing that made violence worse.

The crime in most cities has not substantially increased, if at all, the number of affluent, white people from suburbs who demand heavy enforcement against minor crimes in the city has.

> "White flight", a largely racist reaction to the civil rights movement involving increased protests and riots in cities

I think you have cause and effect reversed here. The original "pull" trigger was the automobile becoming affordable to the middle classes, making suburban living possible and leading to many leaving cities. The racist bit here is that many of these suburbs had covenants prohibiting non-whites.

The "push" factor came when poorer (non-white) people started moving into these vacated, now cheaper inner city properties. This in turn led more whites to leave, but here too the push wasn't just racism, but also concerns about falling property values, rising crime, etc.

Also, FWIW, as a non-American I found the SF of 2019 positively scary. Homeless camps in the Tenderloin, mentally ill people raving about murder on Market St, etc -- you don't see this kind of thing in equivalently wealthy European or Asian cities.

You did mention racism but I would also say racism was a driving force since before white flight. The government precursors to Fannie mae and Freddie mac wouldn't back mortgages that banks created in redlined areas. And the precursor to HUD created segregated public housing, including in the west. The Federal government was pushing redlining and segregation in housing since at least the Great Depression. A lot of this is covered in "The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein.

There were plenty of people liberal enough or cheap enough to live in a black neighborhood. Many tried. But they wound up 100% black/0% white anyway.

Redlining means that everyone living in or near black neighborhood cant get those mortgages or investments or whatever. It also means services are lower for everyone - including white liberals who have limited options just due to living there.

What that also mean is that if one black family moves into white street, every white on that street is at risk to loose exact same things. They become redlined too.

Redlining means that white people have financial incentive to segregate themselves and to push away incoming blacks. Liberal might not mind living with blacks, but will mind being unable to take mortgage he would be able to get otherwise.

> There were plenty of people liberal enough or cheap enough to live in a black neighborhood. Many tried. But they wound up 100% black/0% white anyway.

No, I think when put to the test most liberal people would not do this. If they "tried", why did those neighborhoods wind up 100% black?

Where I grew up, for instance, the second best school in the city (by test scores, at least) was 99% black (mostly the children of alums of a nearby HBCU). White parents would send their kids to worse performing schools with more white kids over sending their kids to that school.

>but here too the push wasn't just racism, but also concerns about falling property values, rising crime, etc.

As a non-American you shouldn't be so quick to relativise the importance of racism because, outside of the US, where cars also exist, there never was a white flight. In fact in Europe the affluent pretty much always move into cities, not out of them, even though those cities also have a lot of the issues surrounding urbanisation. Melting pots and culture clashes, immigration, crime, it's universal to most cities. Pretty much the same in most Asian countries as well, the affluent and poor coinhabit cities. White flight and the giant suburb sprawl is pretty uniquely American.

Even in a place like England, which is traditionally very classist, you don't see the kind of segregation in schooling or housing you have in the US, and London is not super-safe either. This reminded me of a NYT article from a few years ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/opinion/sunday/stop-prete...

I had a hard time understanding the American conception of unsafe city until I ran the numbers and found that in the 80s Belfast (with troops shooting people in the street and bombs going off) was still less lethal than Detroit. (Population adjusted)

It still baffles me how little was done about this in the US and how it was regarded as a local only problem.

> 80s Belfast (with troops shooting people in the street and bombs going off) was still less lethal than Detroit

Well yeah, even during the worst of the troubles it wasn't like there was a drug war going on.

I agree that inner city collapse on the sheer scale of a Detroit is a US-only phenomenon, but it's not too hard to find equivalents elsewhere. Most European cities have distinctly sketchy inner city districts, the wealthy have long since fled the old towns of both Manila and Jakarta for both suburbs and various new developments (BGC, Kuningan) etc.

> outside of the US, where cars also exist, there never was a white flight.

Outside of the US economic circumstances in the 1950s and 1960 were very different and living in the suburbs and commuting to your job was not a possible option for economic reasons. Also, "slav flight" or whatever your European equivalent is just doesn't have that ring to it. There's plenty of segregation outside the US. It's just mostly between groups of similar skin tones.

You assume people want more suburbs, more space. There will always be a market for real dense cities, and it’s not like tech folks participate a lot in making the city attractive (and I include myself in this assessment)

Depends on what happens with crime and “quality of life.” People will step in human turd to get to a job that pays them $400K. They won’t do that to have access to great coffee shops. You’ll at best get the marginally employed bohemians if you don’t solve the crime and homelessness crises.

The tax rate being so high, and expenses so low that it makes living in SF not clearly the optimal economic output. And multiply that effect by 10 when you have kids.

Just school for 3 kids would be, say, 100k after taxes, which would mean you need to earn 150k just to pay school. At 400k your tax rate in california is through the roof.

That really isn’t unprecedented. SF in the 70s and 80s got pretty grimey, attracting younger and more eclectic people who could afford the rents. Those people in turn make the area more desirable, attracting gentrification and then...well, equilibriums win in the long run.

I think the burst of tech workers moving out of Silicon Valley/SF into surrounding suburbs + other areas is driven mostly by people who were already on the cusp of leaving the city.

I've been thinking about leaving SF to move to the East Bay for the last couple years, and COVID-19 has provided a very strong impetus to expedite that move.

Obviously this is anecdotal, and everyone has their own motives, but I haven't heard of many 20-27 years BUYING property outside of their home cities (SF, NYC, etc).

My wife and I never considered moving out, but we're now actively shopping for a house in the Tahoe area. Not as an investment or short term rental property, but to live ~50% of the time.

We're clearly not the only ones. The price of houses in the $1M+ range have gone up significantly since it became clear around the summer that this COVID thing isn't going away anytime soon.

There are many all cash offers as well.

How do you weigh the fire risk in the Tahoe area? The Palo Alto area has smoke risk, and some PSPS risk, but not much risk of straight up burning down. But homes in Tahoe are at significantly more risk of fire, right? Is it possible to get fire insurance there?

Riskier, sure. Insurance? Sometimes...

The person who bought my place last year ended up paying over $6000 a year for insurance via CalFAIR (no fire hydrant nearby). When I bought it in 2013 - it cost about $800 a year. There are definitely people who can't get regular insurance and end up paying a lot for meh insurance.

Do houses in those areas have built-in or compulsory fire protection systems? Some Australian rural houses have roof mounted sprinklers (exterior of the building), water tanks reserved for fire fighting, and so on. I did some drone work for an insurance company after our last fire season, and got photos of places where the fire had been stopped literally a metre short of a building. Either irrigated gardens, protection systems or fire fighters.

Insurance...

For one house that we were interested in, in an area that's not super risky (which is very relative), it's about $2500 per year through CalFAIR. That's only for fire, and doesn't include any other aspect of homeowners insurance.

Just a PSA: home insurance companies have been dropping fire coverage in CA so quickly now that there's a state-mandated stay to prevent them from doing it for a year.

No word what the plan is after the stay but I would be cognizant of any insurance plans that you get.

At some point we need the federal government to step in to provide wildfire insurance a la federal flood insurance. It will have to be reworked for CA considering the flood insurance only goes up to 250k.

Or we could incentivize people not to live in places with wildfire risk by NOT offering insurance (with some sort of graded phase-out for people already living there).

The federal government should not subsidize people to live in places so risky that private insurers refuse to offer coverage.

Don’t worry, California and other states with wildfire risk are not swing states so there’s not much chance of something similar to the NFIP being created.

My sense is that the folks buying $2M+ homes in the Bay Area or $1M+ homes in Tahoe have enough money in the bank that they could just rebuild in cash on the off chance that their home gets burned down. At that price point you're largely paying for the land. Cheap structures (which abound in Tahoe) can be built for ~$250K, while even a really fancy 4000+ square foot mansion in Los Altos can be built for < $1M. Most of the mid-level FAANG employees and ex-startup/growth folks easily have that much in liquid assets.

You’d be wrong.

It’s pretty easy to find prime plots of land in the Tahoe area for less than $250k.

The problem is building: there is a shortage of construction labor (they can’t afford to live in the area anymore), and the building season is short.

Building cost per square footage is higher than in the Bay Area, often exceeding $600/sq.ft.

I would guess that's pretty accurate. Either renters decamping somewhere cheaper/nicer/less crowded for the duration. Or people who were toying with moving out and switching those plans into high gear.

I recently came across this fellow who sold everything and bought a Ghost Town in Cerro Gordo, CA. He runs his business/startup from there remotely.

Some of the most beautiful sunsets and surroundings you can imagine.

Awesome Channel.

Ghost Town Living

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEjBDKfrqQI4TgzT9YLNT8g

It was sad to see the hotel burn down. I'm following him on Patreon hoping to see it rebuilt soon.

Are companies going to start adjusting salaries for people who move (this makes zero sense to me, the value you add most likely doesn’t change because of where you live)?

That’s where this gets weird... people move to these better-to-live places and then all the employers decides to pay them less because of location.

Then you just push up housing prices with salaries that slowly reset over time to be cost of living adjusted to the area.

The crazy salary level was set by location not by skillset alone so the skillset is still valued the same but the location depreciate accordingly.

Just like buying a house: there are 2 variables that contributes to the total value, the land (location) and the building.

Salaries have very little to do with how much value one adds. If anything, it's more about how much value can be extracted. If companies can pay less and get the same value, they totally will.

> Salaries have very little to do with how much value one adds.

Yes, it does; but it's not how much value you, as an individual, add, but how hard it would be to find someone else who could add the same value but would work for less money.

> If companies can pay less and get the same value, they totally will.

Yes, which means companies are aware of how much value an employee adds; they are just also aware of what the current market price is for that amount of value. Whereas, many employees are not aware of that.

In any case, the primary benefit of the observation that the more value you add, the more you get paid is long term, not short term: it tells you that, if you want to increase your total lifetime compensation, you need to become harder to replace. In other words, you need to add, not just value, but some particular kind of value that fewer other people could add if they were hired in your place. The scarcer the kind of value you add is, the higher the price you can get for it.

It’s not about value you bring but competition to get your talent. Someone in the middle of nowhere will get far less offers and way less attractive ones than someone in the middle of SF.

>(this makes zero sense to me, the value you add most likely doesn’t change because of where you live)?

Price is the intersection of supply and demand. A buyer will ask a seller to accept a lower price if they think the seller is willing to accept a lower price. A seller might accept a lower price if they don't think they can get a higher price.

You are paid $X because the buyer couldn't find someone willing to accept $X-1, and you accepted $X because you couldn't find someone to give you $X+1.

Then the question becomes if Sillicon Valley will now also try to hire remotely from a larger talent pool all across the U.S. (or even world).

Silicon Valley, at least the bigger companies, already do that. Most people are not native to the area. Almost everyone I know in the bay area moved there for work.

Yes, but the set of people who are available to work remotely is much bigger than the set of people willing to relocate.

The big tech companies have plenty of satellite offices, though. If you want to work for Google but need to stay in NYC, Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Santa Monica, Seattle, Boulder, Austin, etc. for whatever reason, you can totally do that. You just are somewhat limited in the teams/projects you can be working on, and it may affect your career advancement. (But this likely applies to remote work as well.)

Yes, that's correct. But the question being asked is why the location changes the $X's there. I don't know that restatement of economic generalities helps unless you're going to apply them to the dynamic being asked about.

Clearly the buyer (employer) thinks the seller (employee) will have no choice but to accept lower pay due to the seller having a lack of buyers willing to pay more.

If the buyer's prediction is true, then the seller will accept (maybe not in individual cases, but averaged over entire workforce). If the buyer's prediction is false, then sellers will opt to sell to other buyers offering more.

Because in a world where many jobs are not remote, especially over the longer-term, on average local job options will tend to influence the salaries of people working remotely from that location.

That seems obvious to me: lowering your cost of living means you are willing to accept $X-1, or if you personally don't want to another person that also moved out of high priced living area may accept a lower salary (so they get your job). Otherwise why did companies even have different compensation tiers for same type of work across US regions?

Just because it takes some time for the market to price the changes it doesn't mean it won't do that. Enjoy the initial boost in discretionary income but prepare for having to negotiate lower compensation down the line (or, more likely, not getting any increase in compensation for a long time).

True, also there is now a bigger talent pool to choose from, since you don't need to worry about finding candidates willing to relocate, that means more employees to choose from.

Ok - This is fair - as you make it easier to work from other places, you increase employee supply. That resets the balance. Good points.

Yes I think the increase in employee supply outstrips the rise in remote jobs becoming viable.

I know a know a TON of people looking forward to the next couple of years employment opportunities. lots of people I know have gotten offers from SV, seattle, etc companies but refused to relocate for one reason or another. now that people are accepting of full remote, they have their eyes open for the jobs they want, with the hope that full remote is now an option. I myself turned down many offers from west coast corps because pay wasn't high enough to justify moving and the life style cost and inconveniences increase.

Even if it was obvious to you, I think discussions work better when people don’t have to guess what someone’s explanation is.

That is the whole point of information asymmetry in negotiation. The party with more information has an advantage. All salary discussions are negotiations.

I was referring to clarity about what one's argument is on HN, not information on a job search.

I think that's just a question that people look at backwards. From a company's perspective, salaries outside the SF Bay Area are the "right" ones - they think they're moving closer to the world where location doesn't matter, not further away.

When there are 100 jobs and only 10 qualified people in SF ,all paying huge cost of living, they can command very high salaries to cover COL plus more.

When there are 10 Million people living in dramatically cheaper COL centers they (a) can survive on much less, and (b) are all competing for 100 jobs, driving the supply curve way down.

>> restatement of economic generalities help

because this is a textbook example of why these generalities hold true, but only in really basic, aggregate cases.

Its not the location, is the competition pool. When you become remote, you now increase the competition by a lot of people that also want to work remote, if not half the world.

Its very imprecise to base salary on location, but if remote were just as competitive as in-office, you wouldn't hear people asking to get paid the same when they go remote

agreed if someone is remote is SF or remote in Wyoming, the pay will not depend on the employees personal expenses, but there might be a price differentiator for an SF employee that can come to the office within a moments notice. That adds value that has a cost associated with it.

> and you accepted $X because you couldn't find someone to give you $X+1.

My buddy accepted $X -($X *.8) = $Y because the company offering $Y was doing something ethical. Point being there's far more variables at stake here to over simplify.

Of course, but I didn't think it was necessary to state "all else being equal". In a conversation about why the same employer pays less to people if they move, it's strictly because they can and the employee doesn't have a choice to defect. Whereas in SF, the employee can walk around the corner and start working for someone else. Which is an illustration of the intersection of supply and demand.

You aren’t wrong, but we need to be careful when applying typical market economics to the labor market. It has its own field of study specifically because some of these relationships/intersections breakdown in the employee-employer relationship.

A classic example is the lack of perfect information in the labor market like you see in a commodities market. A more specific example is the wage-fixing scandal that hit tech companies [1]. In this case, the companies used their market power and unified to lower worker wages and stop them from crossing the street for more pay.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/google-adobe-apple-intel-settle-wa...

I see that example as supporting the idea of supply and demand determining price.

Employers colluded to reduce number of buyers, hence reducing demand, causing sellers to have fewer alternatives to sell their services to, causing them to sell at a lower price than they otherwise would.

There may be more effects due to lack of information or ability to move or issues of social signaling compared to a simple example of widgets, but in the grand scheme of thing, it still follows the same principle.

wouldn't the wage fixing scandal, which was essentially illegal oligopolistic behaviour, be an example of how a larger market, wider area supply/demand relationship would look more like the classic economic model, i.e., this exact case?

There isn’t an open market where the worker can get a clear market value for their salary. The companies hold far more information than each worker. Nuances like this non-clearing behavior, geographic forces, compensating differentials, and monopsonies make labor economics it’s own field of study.

Did your buddy take an 80% salary cut? If that’s the case, I’d guess that he was either extremely well paid before, or he’s got huge savings and could afford to not to work anymore.

That said I work for below market because I value the work and enjoy it. Not sure what kind of bump I’d get but it wouldn’t be a 5x

A remote employee as commodity is essentially fungible, in which case why would a company bid more on the same employee living in a higher cost of living area than the same employee living in a lower one?

It would only make sense if employers collude so that those employees can't get competitive offers. Otherwise, why wouldn't another company bid more since location doesn't change the value?

No one said employees are commodities or fungible. That doesn't mean that a negotiation doesn't happen.

I worked for a valley company that changed people's salary if they moved to a new office. Work in the valley, make more, if you moved they'd lower your pay.

Midwest salaries were notably lower.

Oddly enough it was more of a issue brought up by folks at HQ as they knew they were more expensive and a particular group was really paranoid about it... like constantly. It was a bad scene.

This seems similar to how I felt when consulting and knew I was billing at a much higher rate than others. Even if there is some form of value-for-money angle you feel like you have a target on your back and will be an early "win" for the bean counters when the knifes come out. My advice: be prepared for the end at anytime (like 4pm today) and enjoy it while you can!

I have a similar but totally different example from a non-tech field. I live in Texas. We had an office in Bay Area. Sometime we had people in Texas that reported to a higher level people in Bay Area.

For whatever reason, market rate of pay in Bay Area for this field was similar to the market in Texas. However COL had a large variance. We were a pretty tight bunch that knew basic details of each other’s personal lives. It was crazy the amount of subtle strife this dynamic caused. When someone in Texas buys a large home and a new BMW or is traveling all the time. And their peer or even boss in Bay Area is struggling to split an apartment with a roommate well after “roommate appropriate age” by Texas standards.

What you are paid is only somewhat related to the value you bring. Remote work increases the pool of potential employees...

It happens all the time, people in EU with similar skillset are paid much less than people in the US, even after adjusting for the differences what your taxes give you (ie. healthcare).

I don't think it is 1-1 perfectly like that. In silicon Valley, a person with x skills is worth y dollars. If going remote, there will still be people with hard to find skills, probably because all the people with those skills were already in silicon valley. I don't see these jobs getting salary decreases.

however, standard crud jobs that most programmers can do, yeah that will go down as rural employees are willing to work for less out of Utah or something.

At least at places I've worked, there isn't really that distinction though. There's not one of type of engineer that does "standard crud jobs" (whatever that would mean) and another type that designs/scales systems or whatever. Instead, companies seem to prefer to hire generalists who can (theoretically) do either job, even if that means salaries might theoretically be higher. In other words, candidates for engineering positions all go through the same hiring pipeline, with small variations for front-end vs back-end, etc. I think as engineers, we should prefer this, because it gives us greater flexibility in our careers and greater room for growth.

My point I was trying to make is probably such an outlier that it is hyperbole. So you are probably right.

I would guess John Carmack would get paid the same whether he lived in a small hut in Estonia or if he lived in SF. I don't think thats true for the person building a web app for a local company to sell knitted socks.

Facebook announced that they'd be adjusting employee salaries by new home location at the start of the new calendar year, I think.

Some more distributed companies like Salesforce have been adjusting compensation for years when employees move from the Bay Area to other office locations.

Didn’t they adjust it not based on COLA but on what the talent market is in that region? That’s making it explicitly market based, although that obviously includes a cost of living component.

Are they taking into account the fact that the talent market is now national / international given remote work?

I have no idea, but given that it's localized by region, probably not? I don't think anyone knows how the new WFH conditions will impact local market conditions.

Of course they are, and it makes perfect sense.

Pay for software engineering will contract because it turns out programming is not that difficult and there was nothing special about the sf set except their need to cover stupid high rents.

It's going to be quite a reality shock when people realize their salaries were kept high _because_ their jobs weren't open to remote workers.

Wait until programmers realize that telling everybody that they should learn how to code depresses their own wages years later.

Not quite. Consider pay for athletes and entertainers. Why pay Robert Downey Jr. big bucks? There are millions of actors out there!

No, there could be a long tail of meagerly paid folks, just like baristas who aspire to be professional singers. But some folks (allegedly the best of the best somehow) will be getting top dollar.

Robert Downey Jr. is paid more because of brand recognition in the target market (people will watch a movie just because he's in it), not because he's a much better actor than everyone else.

Software developers don't really have that. Maybe if you're John Romero people buy your games without looking too closely, but it's pretty rare in comparison.

I used to think this. Now I think that doing software well is actually very, very hard and even the best practitioners often get it wrong. The market for the best developers will always be high in my view.

This is exactly correct. If you pay for a product you are not entitled to force a price reduction if the efficiencies of the producer improve. In most cases purchasers are not even entitled to know about production costs. It's just that with in person labor purchasers have gotten used to having access to this privileged information and abuse it.

No, the real economic force at work for here is the halo effect. If you're in SV you must be good! You went to Stanford and worked at Google? You must be good! Then competition for that group takes over driving up prices. Housing costs are just an excuse people give themselves / investors.

>If you pay for a product you are not entitled to force a price reduction if the efficiencies of the producer improve.

No, you actually should be. If you work in manufacturing and you're any good at your job, you analyze what it actually cost to make a product. If for example, the price of a commodity heavily used in your product bottoms out from a previously very high price, you should make a call to your supplier demanding some kind of price adjustment (either future or retroactively).

SV paid high prices because the explosive growth and geographic constraints made housing prices very high, therefore salaries had to go up to entice people to come. Rising salaries were not based on competition for talent alone.

I get that a lot of companies are posturing that they wont localize pay, but eventually they'll wise up since their talent pool has grown very significantly. Salaries use to go because pool of applicants who were willing to move to SV was a lot smaller. Now that limitation has all but evaporated. These companies aren't stupid, they'll find cost savings just like those people moving to the boonies.

>If for example, the price of a commodity heavily used in your product bottoms out from a previously very high price, you should make a call to your supplier demanding some kind of price adjustment (either future or retroactively).

You can only do this if you have an alternative, such as another supplier willing to provide you the product at a lower price. But my COGS going down has only partial bearing on what my customer pays me. I charge my customers the maximum I can get them to pay me, and my suppliers do the same to me.

>SV paid high prices because the explosive growth and geographic constraints made housing prices very high, therefore salaries had to go up to entice people to come. Rising salaries were not based on competition for talent alone.

SV paid high prices because they wanted to hire people in a specific geographic area, thereby lowering the supply of labor they had to choose from. If SV expands their supply of labor, and SV thinks it can get the same output from different supplier willing to accept less, then they will choose to do that.

Don't let the employers do that to you. If they try, go elsewhere. I kept my bay area salary while moving to Arkansas.

not everyone has this luxury unfortunately.

Supply and demand.

But, if it ultimately turns out on-site employees provide no real advantages over remote employees, the end result is going to be a grand leveling more weighted toward a downward adjustment in Bay Area wages than an upward adjustment in within-the-US wages.

Yes, just like all the textile and manufacturing wages got a downward adjustment in middle America and got an upward adjustment in Asian countries.

Anecdotally, I'm aware of two companies that do change salaries based on location. One large-ish publicly traded company, and one late-stage startup.

My wager is 90+% of tech companies will adjust salaries by location and 10% or less will pay pan-US salaries.

Salary isn't all about "the value you add" and at the end of the day it's supply and demand.

However, regardless of if the worker is taking a lower salary they should be maximizing purchasing power in whatever location they're working. If you can move somewhere rural, have a better quality of life, and have a higher savings rate while taking a pay cut you're still better off than your counterparts in [HCOL area] making double your salary.

Your salary only matters when compared to your peers in similar living situations.

This "your salary = your value add" meme has never made any sense to me. In a fair world that should be the case, but it never has been and never will be. Proof: offshore outsourcing.

It is an upper bound essentially for a sustainable company and is a point of convergence "your salary <= your value add". It actually maxing out implies being done only because all supply is accounted for. A bigger "value add - salary" essentially moves towards the front of the queue for hiring.

If given two "equal" canidates why pay more if you don't have to? (The actual equality given other complications like cultural, language barriers, and similiar is another topic.)

The "fairness" is also not mathematically viable as it assumes axiomatically that no action can be taken to earn profit that isn't "unfair" as the deserved value is based upon output and not input provided, which leaves no room for expansion nor buffer and no incentive to actually operate a business.

TL;DR - most popular understanding of economics is pretty damn confused.

I'm sorry, but I did not understand your comment at all. Some of those sentences don't parse for me. I don't know what you're trying to say. Can you please clarify?

It seemed clear enough to me. Your salary is less than or equal to the value you add (companies will usually not knowingly pay you more than you’re worth), not equal to it.

The rest was expanding on that core point by computing the expected profit a company gains by hiring someone (value - salary [minus total costs, actually]) and that a company will seek to maximize its profits.

I guess I was confused by the use of the pronoun "it" right at the beginning. With no context, I had trouble deciding what it mean, or deciphering much of the post. What you explained is the only bit I was able to guess at on my own, mostly because it's common sense.

The part about the mathematical viability of fairness was particularly quite puzzling.

I read the initial it as “your salary = your value add” giving a single point figure which is the upper bound of the inequality “your salary <= your value add” and the upper bound on what a sound company would pay.

(It’s actually higher than what a sound company would pay, but if you switch salary out for “total cost to company”, it becomes correct again.)

most famously, gitlab has always done this. others do also and with covid many have announced they would, including such giants as facebook.

your perspective on value is wrong. you aren't paid for the value you bring. in capitalistic society you are paid at replacement cost. this is why unions are so important in some industries (mostly semi-skilled), to stop the next guy for agreeing to work at a lower standard.

now, if you have a lower cost of living, having moved "away", 1/ your net purchasing power is the same, so why would you complain, and 2/ your equivalent replacement cost is lower.

i don't understand your last bit about increasing housing prices. if you are paid less when you move away, how are housing prices pushed up? isn't it the opposite? if you bring your high salary with you, that pushes up housing prices.

> the value you add most likely doesn’t change because of where you live)?

I have been shouting this into the wind for years (as a remote/WFH) employee. I agree with you, 98% of companies out there don't.

Technically while you are correct that it should make no salary difference where workers choose to base themselves, unfortunately corporations and HR will use this as a sorting metric to pay qualified workers less because it's only to their advantage to do so.

While you'd think the worker would benefit from being more globally employable the companies conversely have a larger pool of candidates now to choose from, which means they can afford to pay less for talent.

Companies don't decide how much to pay, its the result of competing forces on supply and demand

Some actually do and more will probably follow suit. This might put you in a bind for lateral movement as well. Much harder to build an effective network over zoom, and nepotism is for better or worse how the world works because there are probably 1000 qualified people for every job opening. If you get laid off from your remote job, it will be tough to land another one when your competition is suddenly the entire country where people are comfortable asking for salaries far lower than yours and companies are happy to exploit cheaper labor.

>> this makes zero sense to me, the value you add most likely doesn’t change because of where you live

Salaries were/are so high because of the limited supply of qualified labour. If they now accept workers from everywhere the supply side constraint just got blown wide open.

Eh.. I think most of the top tech talent in America lives on the West coast or NYC. Sure, might open up to more people - but not "blown wide open."

This is because top tech talent is defined by the people who work in those cities ;)

In other words, I would be very surprised if you were correct, as not everyone has the capability (or desire) to move to large and expensive cities, and the likelihood is that there are lots of very very good people working in the rest of the country due to family situations/age/personal choice.

Personally, I've never had an issue negotiating around this.

Companies will certainly try to pay you less for any number of reasons. But there's no reason you as the employee (with nearly all the leverage in this market) need to let that happen.

I mean sure, it's clear that there's a cost difference between my house here in rural France and its equivalent in the Bay Area. But personally I'd prefer that difference be captured by me rather than my employer, so I don't tend to budge from my "Bay Area" rate.

Here's hoping the rest of us fleeing the bay right now choose to stand up for themselves too.

Until the fires it was hard to imagine giving up the weather and outdoors here in the Bay Area. Now we have COVID which means you want to be outside, but fire smoke that you shouldn't breath, so you want to be inside. I have a lot of HEPA filters running inside, and if I exercise outside, I wear a P100 even at VO2max. But if my daughter weren't keeping us here for her friends, I'd consider moving away now.

I bought a bunch of N95 masks and air purifiers in anticipation of the 2019 fall fire season in the Bay (since 2018 was super bad for the time), and I must say I never could have imagined the ROI on utility from this past year lol

I think this is hyperbole for the majority of people who do not have existing respiratory or other health conditions.

Air quality in SF proper was only bad (by which I mean Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups or above) for roughly a month this year. That certainly doesn't warrant having HEPA filters and P100 masks now in October/November (again, for most people).

“Only bad for a month this year“, but these big California fires now happen every year.

Sure! Yet, (as I mentioned in a sibling comment) living in a beautiful place with really clean air where one can be outside 11 months of the year is way better than most of the world, so I find this tendency to go "OMG everything is now broken" to be an exaggeration that detracts from the continued value the Bay Area offers.

This is wishful thinking. Staying for years around an area that gets "only a month" of excessive PM2.5 particles and smoke is unwise and you will soon become someone with an existing respiratory condition.

I'm leaving the Bay because I value my health way more than the "lifestyle" offered by living in the Bay. There are many other places in the US (And ESPECIALLY outside the US) that offer a fantastic quality of life.

> Staying for years around an area that gets "only a month" of excessive PM2.5 particles and smoke is unwise and you will soon become someone with an existing respiratory condition.

I live in a city which has a serious smog problem in the winter and colder autumn and spring months. Yet most people don't have respiratory conditions.

I never implied that one shouldn't take the necessary precautions that you mentioned (respirators, filters) _during_ that month and stay indoors. I am merely stating that "Now we have COVID which means you want to be outside, but fire smoke that you shouldn't breath, so you want to be inside." is a false dichotomy 11 months of the year in the Bay Area, which is not the case for a lot of other places.

Coming from a country where the air quality is bad 365 days a year, I appreciate what is possible here, and cannot empathize with this tendency to exaggerate the situation.

In the valley it has been nearly continuously elevated AQI since the lightning strikes in late August. There were a few weeks without. But these are particles --- not gas, so your lungs don't expel it once the particles impact and embed in your tissues. The body doesn't really have a way to clean that out that I'm aware of (I'd like to learn that I'm wrong). As an endurance athlete, I move a lot of air, and I want my lungs to be in good shape.

One thing we really like about where we’re living now (peninsula) is there are a lot of mixed race couples with kids and our kids feel this is totally normal.

We’re considering moving but worried that our kids will have a tough time fitting in, especially given how divided our country is.

For other mixed race parents looking to move, do you have similar concerns?

In general, folks with kids are very difficult to migrate. You need to consider whether your spouse's job is remote friendly, and as you mentioned, kids need to find new playmate / school. It's just exponentially harder to relocate than single folks.

I am under the impression that this escaping valley wave is mostly about single folks or young couples without kids.

I can't read the article, but this appears to be hitting us hard here in Bend, Oregon. House prices were already high and only appear to be going higher. I think more people could be a great thing if we get them involved locally, and if we add enough housing to accommodate them, which is tricky right now. As someone involved with a local YIMBY group, it's tough to see the prices - it felt like we were making some progress in several fronts and then BOOM.

In 1978 California passed the ill-conceived Proposition 13 which encourages people to keep houses rather than sell them through lower tax rates for longer ownership.

California has almost 40M residents and Oregon has a bit over 4M, even a fraction of those 40M going north to Oregon is going to overload the housing market there.

Yep. Oregon has something similar in Measures 5 & 50, and it distorts our market as well.

I follow CA housing politics fairly closely because, as you point out, they are important in Oregon too. It has been really dismaying to see them consistently fail to pass the kinds of reform they need.

Prop 15 and Prop 19 are on the ballot. I think those would reduce market distortions if they pass.

I think Oregon has done better than California in this regard, hasn't it, with the ban on single-family zoning?

Yes we have! HB 2001. One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out a bunch of people to speak with our state representative in support, on a weekday morning.

> even a fraction of those 40M going north to Oregon is going to overload the housing market there.

Oregon just needs to build more housing.

Anyplace that people want to live should build more housing of all shapes and sizes - and not artificially restrict housing options with zoning.

"Anyplace that people want to live should ..."

... democratically decide their own course of action with regard to housing, zoning, etc.

There's the view that its an intrusion on personal liberty and choice. Should they also democratically decide what car you should drive? What to name your kids?

Democracy is another kind of oppression, when taken too far.

"Should they also democratically decide what car you should drive?"

It depends. Most western european countries have fairly strict regulations on maintenance, road-worthiness, emissions and sound. Here in California we have relatively strict emissions regulations.

These regulations were, essentially, decided by a democratic process. Presumably if they attempted to regulate color it would fail at the polls.

Exclusionary zoning is basically what they came up with when the Supreme Court decided that you couldn't straight up exclude non-white people.

That's an almost comical level of reductionism concerning exclusionary zoning.

If I lived in a suburban neighborhood I would not want a 7-11 nextdoor. Or a steel fab shop. That is exclusionary zoning and it has nothing to do with race or class discrimination.

It disappoints me to see democracy - and democratic outcomes - embraced only when it produces results we like.

People who run factories aren't going to tear down a house and try and wedge a factory there. That's not the sort of thing anyone wants to eliminate, anyway.

You ought to have a look at this book, which makes the link between exclusionary zoning and flat out racism pretty clear:

https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...

Oh, and I would indeed love to live near a corner store. Lots of people did and would now, too.

I am willing to stipulate that exclusionary zoning (like many other pieces of our laws and jurisprudence) has been used many times in bad faith and to ill effect.

As a literate person versed in current events, of course I am aware of this history.

That does not mean, however, that exclusionary zoning should not and should never have existed.

"People who run factories aren't going to tear down a house and try and wedge a factory there."[1]

When your starting point is well organized, well planned, well intentioned environments it's very easy to underestimate the effects of loosening these restrictions that never made any sense to you and why can't we have a cute little pub right here anyway ?

On the other hand, if you have actually grown up in a place where people had horse corrals next to light industrial with a smattering of houses in-between and oh, look, that's an auto-shop on the back of their residential lot ... you would know that the bullshit people pull in absence of these rules is incredible and fascinating.

When they started enforcing some rules there[2] it had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the fact that one quarter of the town was running unpermitted septic systems because, by god, they were not going to pay for city sewer. Also, llamas.

[1] A family member of mine did exactly this.

[2] Canon City, Colorado

I'm in a part of New England I won't name where this is also happening. Here, it's a convergence of families from both coasts who are now supported by remote work and various wealthy families able to simply buy up real estate that suddenly looks rather underpriced compared to the Bay Area or NYC/Boston. (I say families b/c this rural area is not much of a draw for singles.)

In September I called an agent the day a property hit Zillow and made an appt to look at 1pm the next day. At 10am the property had 7 offers.

I looked a bit at moving to Bend a couple years ago, and already at that point it was getting a little rich for me (also wanting to be close in town). Can't imagine what it's like now.

Just out of curiosity, how long have you been in Bend? My wife was born and raised in Bend and left in her mid 20s. Due to our out of state license plates and IDs she gets a fair amount of "please don't move here you out-of-stater" gruff, and it always feels silly coming from folks that themselves moved here for exact same reasons that the newcomers are flocking now.

A bit more than 5 years. And yes, there's this inane mentality that goes around about 'the new people ruining everything'. I get that attitude from someone who had relatives in the area in 1491, but from someone who moved here not that long ago, it's silly. I think Bend's a better place than when I was growing up on the other side of the mountains. More opportunities, more things to do, even some local tech companies.

Yup. Couldn't read much of the article, but this is me.

I was in SF because employers demanded it, because investors demanded it. Now my company is not only allowing Bay Area employees to leave the state, but hiring remotely. Hell yeah, I'm gone.

I wonder if this is just a fad until people realize they don't actually like the rural life as much as they think they would.

yeah, "the grass is always greener". I grew up in a small country town, it has its charms but it gets old too. By the time I was college age I left and never looked back. Small time life comes with a different set of problems than living in a city but they're still problems.

Same. Go back to rural midwest to visit relatives a couple times a year - I love it but after a week I'm reminded why I don't live there.

Probably. I loved touring the US parks while doing remote work, and I miss the freedom of being able to wander around anywhere and sort of ignore roads, but I wouldn't have been able to live in many of the areas that I adored.

One thing that people underestimate about the US is its vast size. When you live in a city, you have at least a dozen grocery stores within an hour's drive. When you live in a rural area, you drive at least an hour into "the city" which has a Walmart and a Kroger.

There are exceptions, like Utah which is basically one giant city/suburb/church running along the Great Salt Lake with a half-dozen national parks to the South. But I would lean towards this being a temporary trend for most people.

https://archive.is/MOHhK

The prices of bay area homes aren't dropping still. Looks like this migration is still temporary.

Home prices are very sticky. For mental and financial reasons people are very reluctant to price their homes below the rest of the market. During the 08 crash some houses were on the market for years.

Home prices tend to be pretty sticky downwards especially for anyone who hasn't already had significant appreciation. (Though admittedly, a lot of homes in the Bay Area have appreciated a lot unless they were purchased recently.)

That said, I expect most people leaving are those who were renting, perhaps because they couldn't afford to buy. Now they're either renting somewhere cheaper or they're possibly buying if this was something they were thinking about anyway.

That does seem surprising given the massive drop in rental prices there since May. Perhaps the low interest rates are keeping the prices up?

I wonder how long it will take for Bay Area real estate to take a hit if the pandemic continues longer and/or remote working becomes significantly more common.

People aren't moving out of homes in the bay area, they are moving out of apartments in the bay area to where they can actually afford a home.

https://archive.is/MOHhK

It's a two way street. If SV companies drop salaries, other companies will have an easier time attracting away talent. SV will have to increase salaries again to compete.

Ay, I followed the wave. Heading back home to Portland for a bit and then to the Utah desert and beyond.

I actually thought about getting a place in Tahoe for 6 months, but turns out it is completely not workable for me - I don't know anyone in Tahoe - My 5 year old will have no friends - Schools will soon start in person schooling - I would like to be back in office - Will miss the diversity of restaurants / groceries / wineries etc. - Ethnic food or ethnic groceries are non existent

Turns out, you can buy a giant home in the Bay Area, in East Bay and get the exact same things

People LIKE to live on the edge. It is an unfortunate fact ... especially given their are 9B of us. Super bad for the ecology, the encountering of new diseases etc. Suburbs Exurbs, retreats... never ends. If we had a Home (like most animals) we would have to worry much less about despoliation and ravages like fires. Why not have a home to live in and allow ourselves rest, relaxation and recovery in an unspoiled wilderness??

> It is an unfortunate fact ... especially given their are 9B of us.

The current estimate I see most places is 7.8B, where does 9B come from?

I think their writing was supposed to be interpreted a bit performance art'ish.

:) Whew! So glad! The planet might actually survive 38.9678 days more!

Its going to make the voting tomorrow extra interesting. Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah all these red states with blue voting techies arriving.

All 4 of those state will still be red.

We aren't talking about a population altering number of people.

Montana already has a Democrat governor and one senator.

Not anymore.

In NJ, my girlfriend and I chose a really bad time to buy. Houses that were a very reasonable ~$300k last year are pushing $400k.

Anecdotally, I just moved from the Bay Area to Asheville and am taking my tech job with me. So, could be true... Real estate there is crazy right now. The local agents say houses have been selling very quickly, often sight unseen to California buyers.

Hello fellow Asheville-area resident! I'm actually really surprised to hear that. NC, and the southeast in general has traditionally been a pretty hard sell for Californians, from a cultural perspective at least. New Yorkers and Floridians have been colonizing the area for ages though, so figures that Californians would catch on eventually. I made the move back to NC after 5 years in Seattle, and don't regret it one bit.

Anyhow, welcome to the area! The techie / startup scene here is pretty small, but it's good folk and a tight community.

Haha, thank you for the welcome! I actually grew up in the southeast though so we are moving back closer to family :) My wife and I always liked visiting Asheville and decided to live there.

I’m not sure if the other people from California moving there are similar (moved away and came back) or if it’s their first time in the southeast.

On the other hand the rent prices in Bay are have dropped 35% or more which makes it way more affordable for quality of life and good year round weather.

All my friends and coworkers are still in the valley, excepting 1 person who was already moving to Denver to join his partner.

Even the federal government has geographical cost of living adjustments to salaries.

I think the migration out of the bay will make it a more reasonable place to live. We do have some of the best weather in the world. I'm going to gamble on staying.

Hopefully this isn't like detroit.

San Diego and LA have SFBA easily beat in terms of weather.

Of course but bay is still one of the best in the world.

Also the bay encompasses more than SF, while SF and daly city have notoriously foggy weather, the rest of the bay area is quite good.

There's a narrow slice between San Mateo and Santa Clara that has great weather.

Anything North or West is cold and foggy.

South Bay and East Bay pushes 100F for 3 months a year.

And this is before you consider that we now have 1-2 months of smoke season.

South and East Bay only have ~10 days a year of 95+. You make it sound like Texas.

For the south bay it's not 3 months of the year, 100F lasts for like 2-3 weeks at most (actually realistically it's more like 95-100). It's the same for socal. Socal has about 2-3 weeks in the summer where the temps become sweltering.

Even within LA the temperatures vary, the closer you are to the coastline the better the weather.

I know because I grew up in the south bay, I lived in SF for 2 years and lived in LA for 10 years.

What's overall better in socal is that the winters are much more mild. In the south bay the worst you can get is ice in the morning and really cold nights. Socal winters just has a very slightly lower temperature than spring.

Not trying to say NorCal has better weather than Socal. I'm saying NorCal has some of the best weather in the world despite it not having the "perfect" weather that Socal has. The entire CA coast line is afterall still in the mediterranean climate zone.

The best weather really lies between Socal and Norcal: SLO and SB. Their biggest weakness was always the lack of local jobs.

I feel like they're both at the level where it's a minor tradeoff between fog and summer heat, and for me fog is the clear choice.

Unless you don't like summer heat and heat waves. SF is more consistently around 70F. Depends if you like 55F - 75F versus 70F - 90F

We're talking about the same SF from this summer where the heat waves were just as bad as SoCal? California climate change now means you're going to get heat waves pretty much everywhere.

Never felt remotely hot where I live in SF. Maybe towards Mission and further south/east.

San Diego is right in the range that you are describing. Average highs in August are ~75. I'm biased though since I lived in San Diego for a couple of years and have never lived in or near San Francisco. Inland is much hotter in San Diego though.

https://www.weather-us.com/en/california-usa/san-diego-clima...

A 100* heat wave in LA only clocks like 82* in san diego. Then again on that 100* LA day it is still only like 85* on the coast.

I'm inclined to agree, if you can be near enough to the ocean to tame the summer heat.

SFBA winters are kinda miserable IMHO. It's not rust belt snow bad, but consistently cold and wet for months isn't exactly ideal.

And SF-proper regularly being fogged in renders too many nights useless WRT enjoying the outdoors, year-round. It's almost pointless to have something like a rooftop deck or outdoor patio. It'll all corrode and rot before you get sufficient use of it.

San Mateo manages to escape most of the negative fog effects though, I enjoyed living on the hill by 92 and Hillsdale Blvd. We'd regularly watch the apocalyptic fog stall @ Skyline while enjoying dinner outside on our deck.

> We do have some of the best weather in the world.

Certainly some of the sunniest in the English-speaking world. Personally (as an ex-Londoner), I overheat a lot and actually miss a good rainstorm from time-to-time - but your evaluation does line up with most people's, I think.

Let's just gloss over the increasingly-common smoke from wildfires... :)

>Let's just gloss over the increasingly-common smoke from wildfires... :)

Yeah that part is bad. Not sure how to rate CA in general when you account for this as the wild fires only started getting crazy recently. For most of my life overall the fires weren't a problem.

>Certainly some of the sunniest in the English-speaking world. Personally (as an ex-Londoner), I overheat a lot and actually miss a good rainstorm from time-to-time - but your evaluation does line up with most people's, I think.

Scientifically it is actually rated as some of the best in terms of closest to something like room temperature throughout the year. It's a climate zone called the mediterranean climate zone. It exists in a few places in the world.

> Hopefully this isn't like detroit.

Even if it became more like Detroit you'd still have what Detroit can never have- nice weather and unbeatable nature right outside your doorstep.

I think it's unlikely to turn out like Detroit, and I say that as someone who wants to leave the region.

The region will continue to have many of its best qualities: good weather, (relatively) diverse culture, access to nature, and good employment prospects. The biggest issue with the region is the high cost of living, but any relief in housing costs will only make the area more appealing again. There's a high floor.

So in spite of what Friedman and his Chicago goons would have had us believe, it turns out the world is in fact not, flat.

Huh.

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