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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

You say this as if companies don't chose where to have their offices and their attendance policies.

If a company places it's headquarters in a HCOL area and requires everyone come in 5 days a week, then yes, they have a responsibility to pay a salary high enough that their employees can survive there.

If employers don't like the fact that COL is too high, THEY can go ahead and march on city hall to advocate for political action. Companies have a MUCH larger sway with local politicians than the average employee does. That, or they can increase the salary or change the attendance policies.

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Companies may have more sway than an individual employee, but that sway is still close to zero. Why? Because everyone knows that once enough key employees live nearby, they can't just pick up and move the company somewhere else.

Google, for example, has been trying for over a decade to build some medium-density housing near its campus. This goes beyond just advocating for political action (which they're also doing) -- they're actually offering to finance the project and assume all risk -- all the city has to do is stop saying no.

But every time it comes up for approval, local residents show up to complain, and the city council finds some arbitrary reason to say no.

Google still has options (which, granted, they've exercised) including adding more remote offices.

They don't want to do that because they've already spent a bunch of money on their fancy HQ and don't want to see it empty out.

There are plenty of employers with < 1000 employees, however, crowding these downtown areas. They have way more flexibility in being able to move out of these city centers and into more affordable locations for everyone. They don't because part of the reason for their offices in these downtown location is rich people showing off to other rich people. You gotta "look" successful.

> They don't because part of the reason for their offices in these downtown location is rich people showing off to other rich people. You gotta "look" successful.

If an office is moved to a less densely populated area, the average commute time of all employees collectively ends up increasing.

The way rich people actually show off to other rich people is by doing what's right for their companies, thereby increasing the value of their equity - which then allows them to buy luxury goods and impress other rich people that way.

>If an office is moved to a less densely populated area, the average commute time of all employees collectively ends up increasing.

Not necessarily. I've lived in rural areas and the number of miles you could travel per minute is significantly higher than the miles per minute in an urban area. My current commute time would be the equivalent of around 15 miles in the very much less urban area. Also when you factor in that property is cheaper for things like parking and factor in extremely easy door to door parking, commute times drop down even more. At one point I lived in a condo and had to walk 8 minutes from my condo door down the garage to my parking spot. I now have a house and my car is directly out my side door.

Population density relative to commute doesn't seem to be such a clear cut relationship. In theory in a dense area you have to travel less, in reality people work where they can and don't want to move constantly so commute times can get quite long.

>>Because everyone knows that once enough key employees live nearby

It is almost like, in any context, centralization is bad. I am not sure why we has a civilization have to keep learning this lesson, over and over and over again

Anytime you centralize anything it results in bad outcomes.

Diversity, Diversification, Distributed Models, etc are ALWAYS preferable, I dont care if you are talking about Stocks, People, Housing, Power, Government, you name, Consolidation and centralization is always bad

Centralization is just a tool (if methods of organization are tools).

Sometimes, it's clearly the right choice (where are program settings settings? `~/.config`).

It's also VERY simple. If all you want is client/server version control, and you don't mind the constraints, SVN's UX and learning curve beats git's by a long shot.

Decentralization buys you flexibility, but entails tons of complexity.

your case to prove centralization is sometimes good is SVN over git

I can not envision any scenario in which I would choose SVN over git

If you don't need decentralized version control, why wouldn't you? Have you ever used SVN? It's much easier than git. :D

Decentralization of people and housing == suburban sprawl, car dependency, tens of thousands of fatal collisions, the climate crisis, etc. Decentralization shifts the difficulty into communication/coordination, which is sometimes more tractable but also sometimes not.

Centralization of people is not "good" for the environment either, People are polluters, high levels of people in an area causes pollution as well

This is my problem with the studies on suburban sprawl is they do not factor in all of the things, they are generally only looking at one thing namely car and home pollution

Then you have Higher Crime, and a whole host of other matters that come with Dense Urban Centers that you do not get when people spread out.

On Balance I will take suburban sprawl over Urban Density every day, and twice on Sunday

What specific forms of pollution besides transportation and home energy use do you think are important here? Humans are mainly polluters by virtue of our homes and cars, which a lot more intense in decentralized environments.

Suburbanites are at very high risk of life-altering consequences from the actions of other humans. Many of those actions are crimes (DUI, distracted driving, reckless driving), but worse, some are not even crimes (incompetent driving, tired driving, intentional killing of annoying cyclists). That we feel so differently about these compared to more traditionally urban forms of crime is just cognitive bias with a helping of racism.

The greenest place for humans to live is in dense cities. https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1418581766047105025

The environmental impact of the average NYC resident is among the lowest in the US.

And with respect to density, produce for NYC was grown within sight of Manhattan as late as 1960. The impact of the belt of suburbia from Richmond, VA to New Hampshire is far more harmful that the cities.

Centralization of people into cities led to many, many, many historical advancements in arts and sciences.

Decentralization of cities - competition - sometimes helps even more, but the societies that never centralized never got as far. (And that decentralization can backfire sometimes too, e.g. military competition instead of economic.)

Societies that never centralized didn't get far mainly because they were conquered by the societies that did. But I don't think it's reasonable to consider that an advantage of centralization - it's more that it turns out to be such a huge disadvantage, it spills over to your neighbors even if they don't like it.

> they have a responsibility to pay a salary high enough

No, they don't. The employee gets to decide if the salary is high enough to meet his needs. If it isn't, the employee can negotiate for more, or go elsewhere.

Nobody is obliged to work for a company they find unacceptable.

This is correct. The most "obligation" that an employer might have is to pay the employee for the value of their work, and even that's dubious. (show me the source for your moral argument) They certainly have no obligation to match CoL.

If an employer doesn't pay their employees enough, those employees should leave, their employer will eventually die, and that'll add another data point to tell the shareholders to either elect CEOs that will pay more or to stop backing companies in high-CoL areas.

They don't have a responsibility to the employees, but from what I understand having all your staff walk out is generally seen as bad for business.

They have a responsibility to their owners to pay enough to be successful - but the thresholds for "mass company-ending resignations" vs "complaining on the internet" are very far apart.

Supply and demand. COL is a downstream price signal as far as a rational employer is concerned. While they might try to influence it to alter the supply of potential workers in their favor, it is by no means their responsibility to do so.

And saying companies choose where the highest concentration of available talent resides is dishonest.

> Supply and demand.

Yup, there's a low supply of employees and a high demand for them. So guess what the absolute dumbest thing is an employer can do when employees start clamoring for COL adjustments?

There are so many other factors in play than whether "employees start clamoring for COL adjustments" or not, so the correct course of action when that happens might very well be to reduce wages or do nothing.

They don't have a responsibility to do so, but they shouldn't be surprised when employees are angry at them if they don't do one or the other

> While they might try to influence it to alter the supply of potential workers in their favor, it is by no means their responsibility to do so.

I don't see why employers can have efforts to address climate change and social justice problems, but cost of living for their local communities is too much.

Because their efforts for climate change and social justice are just cheap words?

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