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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

The remote job market is going to get quite interesting.

Would you create an in-person startup these days? Is that how you would start a company? My guess is you start a company remote first - if for no other reason to avoid the office cost, and be open to any talent.

If many larger companies are in person - what does that mean for how things look in 10 years?

With startups being more remote, would there be a bias towards remote workers, living in lower cost of living areas, actually being the hub of innovation? Making the "cities" a kind of anti-innovation-hub of more humdrum corporate work?

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It it were me and I was truly starting a start up, I would do it in person, at least while we’re in the single digit employees, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be anywhere close to SF, where costs are just insane.

It’s be somewhere with a reasonable CoL but still nice to live in… Charlotte/RTP, Nashville, maybe Chicago or Philly if you really wanted to be in a big metro.

Alternative would be remote, but try to cluster the employees so you could get together in person a few times a month with no one (ideally) having to drive much more than an hour or so round trip.

> It’s be somewhere with a reasonable CoL but still nice to live in…

The funny thing is, this is why companies were in San Francisco. Back when the tech industry was far less than it is now, San Francisco was "a reasonable CoL but still nice to live in" even though it was all the way over there in California.

Then San Francisco got expensive so people tried Seattle...then Denver...then Austin...and so the wheel turns. And each time, we fail to learn the lessons of what made those places get more expensive as more people wanted to move there. Then we try again somewhere else, expecting that new people won't have the back story and existing people will happily move.

I've been working on computers for a job for decades and we still haven't gotten it right.

> San Francisco was "a reasonable CoL but still nice to live in" even though it was all the way over there in California.

Can you provide some citations on this? I've been told San Francisco has always been expensive.

You are correct, SF and coastal California has been the most expensive real estate in the US many decades. The price premium has widened quite a bit though.

> And each time, we fail to learn the lessons of what made those places get more expensive as more people wanted to move there

I don't understand what you're saying. Most people want to have bought California property 30-40 years ago. "Don't do that or you'll retire in an inflation adjusted $5MM home!" is a strange pitch to get people to do what you want.

To say nothing of the fact that all the other interests (city planners, developers, etc.) also want that outcome.

I thought things got started in silicon valley because it was cheap with Stanford nearby. Then hardware slowly changed to software. As things grew people moved to San Francisco to enjoy life of the big city and still be close silicon valley. Microsoft moved to Seattle because it was Gates's home. And Nintendo was there because Seattle was closer to Japan. Microsoft grew and created a mini silicon effect in Seattle. The growth of Seattle had nothing to do with the prices in San Francisco. I think prices have very little bearing on this kind of things.

I am starting one in person. It’s so much more efficient when it comes to getting things done. I’m sorry quality of life folks.

This doesn't take into account that C-suites might like going into big offices in the city and walking around seeing all the people who work under them. Maybe being an executive lacks panache when it involves leading Zoom meetings in your pajamas.

Before 2010, urban planners complained that CEOs tended to relocate offices from the urban core and out to whatever suburb on the edge of the metro gave them a short commute, while screwing over the rest of the workers who then had to commute either from the city or from other far-flung suburbs, few of which had transit connections to that suburb, even if they had transit into the city. Interesting to see it change to CEOs wanting offices in urban cores.

If I were making a startup involving anything hardware/physical/analog material then yes in-person for sure, I'd let some work remotely but fly them in when needed. The in-person network+agency+build effects is too demoted, sometimes just you can't beat the effectivity and efficiency of being close to one another.

I don't have an answer for your 10 yrs outlook.

Having spent time in developing countries, for atleast a quarter of the year, recently I still have not found the consistency of agency comparable to what we have in the US. There's a lot of factors that play into that could be another thread in itself. I did meet and see a lot of American expats/educated/-background people who were largely magnets and hubs of innovation for some of these developing/lower COL areas. And I have and do applaud them for their tenacity and work but the network effects still end up fighting/resisting them locally. So to answer I think there will not be a bias towards remote workers in macro scale and I think could be bias towards remote workers being the hub of innovation in very specific niches, only one I can think of right now is vehicular and automotive design is but I could be bias.

Keen to discuss more!

Office space cost is not an issue for startups. Talent is the big thing. You can get pretty cheap co-working space including a private office without committing to a long term lease (a 6 months lease is pretty common).

You raise a good point. If most startups start remote these days, then next decade most tech companies will be remote. They are (at least some) are the big companies of the future.

I think for startups it really depends on how they start. Sometimes it's a few student friends building a company together and in that case they start in-person and likely to stay like that. In other cases it's one person looking for a co-founder and they meet someone Online who is in a different location and the company stays remote because of that. Then it also depends how they grow. Many hire a lot of contractors in the early days and it's mostly remote folks in other countries.

+1, would like to hear more from remote-only early stage startups. I would imagine in the early stage you'd want everyone in-person to keep everything in sync more easily, but a lot of new companies seemed to come out of 2020 doing really well with full remote.

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