Hacker News Reader

Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Cheering on office space becoming worthless is fun, but if course nearby residential housing is next. Once you can really work for your company from anywhere, the value of your house within 30 min commute to your FAANG employer drops by quite a bit.

View on HN

Once your FAANG company realises your they can hire someone who "works from home" for 5 figures instead of 7 figures, thanks to a modest cost of living in their different country, you are in real trouble.

I heard that in the 1990s. Yet all the cheap Indians who were meant to eat my lunch are now expensive Indians I have lunch with.

I largely agree but would note that one thing which killed a lot of outsourcing projects were timeline and language barriers. If you’re in, say, Pacific time there’s still a lot of room to go down from Bay Area salaries while avoiding both of those problems. I think we’re about to see the largest experiment yet of how well people can really run remote development projects.

Saving this comment!

Edit: how do I save/favorite this? Only way I can do it is by flagging it currently :/

Click the timestamp on it, then you can favorite it (or at that point bookmark it).

Click the timestamp (“x minutes ago”), there are more options under that.

Under rated comment.

Not sure. You wont get the best people by being cheap. If FAANGs are making monstrous profit they don’t want to rock the talent boat. If you have a company making crazy profit and the people making that happen get paid 5 figures those people just leave and get YC to pay 6 figures for a small slice of their next idea.

You still retain the timezone advantage for communicating with the bosses. Same language, too.

they can already do that.

Yeah I was going to say that ship sailed several years ago at least.

But that’s good, isn’t it? Finally I could afford to buy something instead of renting.

Hasn’t most of FAANG flipped back to RTO?

Cheap housing? Oooh noooo. All the boomers who bought up multiple homes as an "investment", to extract rent from younger generations, will get hosed? Oooooh nooooo.

Somehow, I suspect, people who can't afford houses now will still somehow be fucked. Not sure how but still.

For housing to be affordable, the rule of thumb is the monthly cost needs to be about 1/3 of your (net? gross?) income. so either housing costs need to come down or your income needs to go up.

We get screwed when we have no real leverage to increase income. You can grow it somewhat by job hopping, but even that has limits as you age. Even if you save and invest, divorce and medical bankruptcy will fuck you over.

Good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com