The rise of remote work may reshape college towns

That makes sense. Certification, or more specifically licensing, is ever the go to tool for people protecting their industries from what they see as encroachment by others.

Planet Money had an interesting episode on this long ago, which used Hair Salons as an example.[1]

1: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/524007928

It would make little sense for an Argentine developer to learn the intricacies of Slovenian data protection regulations. It makes a lot more sense for her to learn the intricacies of GDPR (and whatever the US comes up with).

There are sufficiently many companies in the US that don't even like doing this across state lines - much less international boundaries.

---

I won't argue with the "bad and entitled" aspect. I've seen that when doing interviews myself. There's a bit of "if you've got 1000 applications for three different positions, 900 of them are the same across those positions that are having difficulty getting hired". From https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...

> Astute readers, I expect, will point out that I’m leaving out the largest group yet, the solid, competent people. They’re on the market more than the great people, but less than the incompetent, and all in all they will show up in small numbers in your 1000 resume pile, but for the most part, almost every hiring manager in Palo Alto right now with 1000 resumes on their desk has the same exact set of 970 resumes from the same minority of 970 incompetent people that are applying for every job in Palo Alto, and probably will be for life, and only 30 resumes even worth considering, of which maybe, rarely, one is a great programmer. OK, maybe not even one. And figuring out how to find those needles in a haystack, we shall see, is possible but not easy.

There's an entire thread to head off on for the why this is the case.

I will claim that for places where the salary isn't tech company stratospheric, the average entitlement goes down a bit.

Outsourcing is not new. Many companies have tried it. Not just in CS, but extensively in CS.

Not only are US CS skills higher, but communication is the most important skill in the industry. Good communicators add more value and do it faster than people with whom you struggle to communicate. People that don't understand that now will understand it after a few years of working with a company in a different time zone without a native grasp on English.

Another problem you'll face is that outsourcing means that another company (since you usually just contract with a foreign company) is gaining expertise in your product, domain, and tech stack. That knowledge gained doesn't stick with your company. If you're unhappy with that company or they fail to perform in the future, you have to train a new team from scratch.

A common pattern I've seen is that companies will outsource as a fledgling startup then move to insourcing after the MVP is up because it's easier to work with an internal, local team, and the initial team falls short once you get to the hard stuff.

I do suspect there's selection bias. Most US devs are employed and well paid already. It's hard to get the good ones to apply for new jobs because tech hiring is a pain in the ass. Imagine having a full time job, family, life, and taking a day off for interviews (while working! what, we're supposed to take PTO?), or spending your weekend on a coding challenge? Most of the remaining applicants are probably the lower end of the talent pool - younger or bad. Your individual sample size is also likely too small to make broad judgments about entire nations.

I'm not sure what will happen, but it's quite plausible that the dynamic has changed.

Which in itself will affect the market and how much those positions pay in general. You can't have a large chunk of a workforce decide that they're willing to take a 20%-50% pay reduction for other benefits and expect it not to affect the entire workforce.

I don't think that means people in and around SF will have to work at the same pay rate as those working remotely necessarily, but I do think it might result in lowering the high-end of the scale, and spreading the distribution quite a bit.

Absolutely this. I love working remotely and will probably not go back to an office until at least the kids are out of school. But both being new and training new people are skills that are just _different_ from being in the office.

Open offices were not a good fit for me, but one valuable thing from a past job was sitting close to both my manager and their manager. That was a way to learn "Oh, that's how you talk to <client A, department B, etc>" without having to be told "this is how you talk to these people." Training a remote new person requires so much more intentionality that most people are not accustomed to.

And just fundamentally, think of the site you're on. How unimaginative. How big is your data set? Why can't your sample mentor well remotely? Are there bigger data sets or published analyses? What can you do to improve your model?

Or is it just that you prefer to work in an office, or you don't trust your employees?

Your argument is the "Think of the children^H^H^H interns" argument from the Cathy Merrill's Washingtonian op ed. [1] It doesn't hold water with anyone seriously trying to improve the productivity and happiness of a diverse workforce comprised of people who have different preferences for home or office; in person or zoom.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/07/cathy-merril...

Aren't there engineers who grow and evolve through the sort of "mentoring" (ad-hoc or otherwise) they get through remote open source contributions? To the extent that a github presence is increasingly a prerequisite for certain engineering jobs I wonder if this shift isn't already under way.

I'm not saying it's a direct or even desirable replacement for IRL mentoring, but it does seem like there is at least a rough framework in place for helping people grow as engineers outside of a workplace. It's a little more self directed and rough and tumble, but then work in general seems to be going in that direction over the last few decades.

Sure I learn where the bathroom is, what the specific local dev workflow is, etc. but in terms of fundamentally improving my skills as a developer that has always been to a very large degree due to my own efforts at seeking out knowledge.

I still find this assumption baked in to a lot of the criticisms of remote work. I'll give the benefit of the doubt here that you don't thing remote = never talking to people, so the assumption would seem then to be that video conferencing and text chat is not "interacting" with people.

It very much is, and a lot of people have made it work in a lot of different contexts for a long time. Most of the drawbacks that still exist in certain situations are things that, given time, we'll solve.

Already in the past year, we've seen at least one report showing WFH productivity increasing 46% relative to the productivity in offices.[0] I can't think of any reason why this trend wouldn't continue--we're still at a stage where there's a _lot_ of low hanging fruit.

[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28461/w284...

Even if CS doesn't directly translate, if you can jump through the mental hoops, it likely predicts success in software engineering. You will likely do well in S/W Engineering if you have a high IQ and you have attention to detail. Since it is illegal to filter people by IQ in the USA, you have to jump through an expensive hoop to prove you have a high IQ, which also happens to vet for attention to detail and ability to focus on tasks. There is no reason that s/w engineering couldn't be taught using an apprenticeship model after doing an IQ test, but the later is illegal.

I take 1 student a year for practice placements for a month and the university gives me full library access.

Work out a sharing system with your colleagues and you could get this access for 1 rotation every 5+ years.

If it's a public university then your tax dollars already do.

[0] I didn't have a driver's license, too young at the first high school, and insurance was too much for my parents or me to afford at the second.

My interpretation of this post was that it was trying to draw people away from major urban areas. Some of those examples you give are either in or on the edges of major cities.

David St. Hubbins: What?

Ian: Yeah. I wouldn't worry about it though, it's not a big college town.

- This Is Spinal Tap

And houses are -cheap-

A largely transient population creates economic incentives to create and perpetuate all sorts of bad and immoral behavior.

And by "bad and immoral" I'm not talking about drinking to excess and the bar that doesn't ID, I'm talking about running a predatory towing company, being a jerk slumlord landlord because your tenants won't be around to take you to court, etc. etc. Often times the local governments even try and take a cut by engaging in revenue policing (as if they weren't already in a better revenue position than the surrounding towns). And when you're in an economic environment like that the only way to get ahead is to do all the bad things everyone else is doing. You can't run an honest business when your commercial landlord is setting rates based on the profits of all the dishonest businesses.