Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

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These programs existed for decades before the pandemic. They never caught on for a very simple reason: CoL is literally the only advantage. $10K is nothing compared to the uphill climb of career progression that inevitably comes with remote work. Hell, $10K literally less than my first relocation package and I was moving a single bedroom. TL;DR: no one moves to SFBA because it's the best CoL vs salary choice, and there are some great sweet spots for tech before places like Tulsa (eg Portland, KC, even Seattle)

CoL is the real attraction, but if you don't care about the dearth of cultural amenities, why choose a mid-sized city in a state that doesn't have any non-Catholic private schools worth paying for and couldn't even keep all of its public schools open 5 days a week in pre-pandemic times?

If you don't need good schools or cultural institutions, why not instead choose New Hampshire? Or rural Oregon? Or, as you pointed out, the Ozarks? Heck, IMO, Branson and Springfield have better public schools than Tulsa suburbs, and Branson even has more theater than Tulsa if you're ok with genuinely 100% world-class performers doing kitsch on faux river boats.

I actually moved to the Bay Area because long term it has the best compensation when accounting for cost of living that I calculated for net take home pay unless I wanted to move over to NYC fintech (definitely don’t want to). While $300k+ is a pipe dream in most of the US, it’s attainable in the Bay Area working for a big tech company as a modest goal.

Absolutely true. Really. Just don't have 4 kids :)

Agreed that Branson is actually a nice place to live. Due to the tourism, it is rather loaded with good restaurants and entertainment like museums, Imax theater, camping, hiking, etc. Though you do have to deal with a lot of tourists and traffic during the summer busy season.

Some areas in Branson even have symetric fiber, I believe even gigabit.

You could probably get a nice house in a gated community on the golf course for $500k+.

> We've had over a thousand applicants just in the last two weeks alone. Over half of them are from California, many from the Bay Area

If the program isn’t new, I wonder what the total numbers are like since covid started. The article only mentioned 1000 people over two weeks (from all over the country)

I have to imagine there have been A LOT more than 1000 Tulsa residents who left Tulsa for tech jobs in greener pastures over the last 20+ years.

This isn't an infusion of talent. It's probably a teeny tiny fraction of the brain drain returning to test the waters or, more likely, just to leverage grandparents for some free daycare while pandemic is on. And this is the high-point of interest.

> non-Catholic private schools

what's wrong with public schools?

In the case of Oklahoma, the phrase immediately following what you quoted:

> couldn't even keep all of its public schools open 5 days a week in pre-pandemic times

The persistent underfunding. Everyone who can afford to send their children to private school will do so because OK public schools are plain awful. Of course it's impossible to raise taxes to attract any sort of decent teacher or buy equipment or even paint because it's Oklahoma, no one is using public school anyway, so why fund it.

But what's wrong with Catholic school? They have a tradition of being quite secular and open to different worldviews.

> But what's wrong with Catholic school? They have a tradition of being quite secular and open to different worldviews.

I went to Catholic school, and politically, they certainly seem to be for restricting other people’s freedoms (see abstinence only sex education, gay marriage, and abortion). My whole sex education at the age of 14 or so was a slideshow of genital herpes or sores and “don’t do it”.

There’s also the whole decades long organizational support of child molestation issue that one might want to avoid supporting.

At least the official position of the Catholic Church isn't biblical literalism, so you won't get the A-Beka crap. The Presbyterians down here in my village in Alabama inflict the stuff on the poor kids.

I grew up Catholic in a tradition where the social responsibility was taken seriously (also see here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolpingwerk). We didn't have the abstinence-only nonsense either, that must be particular to certain regions in the US. BTW, the Catholic position is that marriage is a sacrament that the couple administers to each other (the only sacrament where a priest is not needed), and, well, sex is complicated, and all sorts of Reddit drama happens when FWBs catch feelings & so on. This was actually how the subject was treated in school.

The recent child abuse revelations are disappointing. I always said that child abuse isn't confined to catholics, but the hierarchy at least provides some oversight that you don't have in megachurches, but it's clear that that did not happen, it was a total failure up to the Pope.

Surely there must be a few good schools. I grew up in Tennessee and there were 4 or 5 good high schools in the state, one for each of the major cities plus an extra one due to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They also happened to be in the suburbs where the foreigners (i.e. everyone hadn't grown up in the area) were placed. But yes, public schools are chronically underfunded in the "red" states.

NOTHING! I LOVE public education.

But...

1. See the part of that comment where Okalahoma can't even keep many of their public schools open 5 days a week. And then guess at the quality of the ones that do stay open...

2. Screw the emotional/psycho-sexual abuse of Catholic schools.

I love the lower midwest, but god... even the "good" school districts in the "wealthy" suburbs are... not great.

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