Hacker News Reader

Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

Companies are trying to hire more outside of California in order to lower wages across the board

This could turn out to be a very good thing for the country. It's a social & economic problem if all the money & opportunity are squeezed into just one metro.

View on HN

> This could turn out to be a very good thing for the country.

Once you cross the hump to not seeking physical proximity when seeking to minimize labor costs, there's very little reason to go to the rest of the US once you leave the SFBA.

The country it's good for isn't the US.

Have you ever looked at the map of US HP campuses in their heyday? Dispersed across the country, with regionally clumped physical proximity, a foot in numerous labor markets and all tidily within a couple timezones.

You might think of HP as a California company but they had large engineering hubs all over the country.

Why did you assume those jobs will stay in US?

Have you seen the offers for remote work? Almost every one is "remote (us citizen)", "remote (same timezone)", "remote (monthly onsites)". Unless the companies are prepared to open whole divisions with colocated management in other countries, the jobs are staying local.

Anyone who has worked with remote programmers, unless they happen to have hit the jackpot on them, really has no desire to ever do it again. Timezone differences, language differences, cultural differences, communication differences, etc, etc, all combine to chew up so much more time and money than the nominal savings of hiring someone local. And the good remote people don't cost appreciably less anyway.

You seem to be agreeing with the parent. Large timezone differences, cultural differences, and language differences can be real remote challenges. (Although, in my experience, US--at least ET--to Europe works pretty well. Takes more to coordinate Asia in general and probably want to minimize the amount of synchronous communications.)

After a decade or so working remotely I'd describe that differently. If someone working remotely finds a company with culture where remote work is fully functional rather than something odd that people have to work around, they hit jackpot. Unless everything's documented online, every meeting is online, every water-cooler chat has a link published, etc. then remote work is going to suck for everyone.

Yes. Even then, a lot of the tech jobs remain in the US.

Look at the job listings for US tech company EMEA HQs. It's almost all sales and legal. Occasionally a pre-sales Engineer position comes up.

Meanwhile, they are hiring dozens of Devs at their US HQ.

Hiring foreigners is a pain. Companies did it because the headache offset the savings, without the savings the headache may no longer be worth it.

Many of them definitely won't, but daylight and the location of management's homes are still limiting factors to off-shoring. Synchronously managing people in distant time zones is no fun, and trying to do it asynchronously is really inefficient. There may be a solution to this 'problem', but until they come up with it, letting people work remotely from their homes in the same city isn't a slippery slope to all jobs being off-shored.

Or, probably more accurately, it is a slippery slope, but not a very steep one. I do believe that jobs (and wages) are going to get distributed differently in the future. But, I'm hopeful that it'll be an improvement over having every high-paying job be in the same 5 dystopian cities.

They’re not hiring people in the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com