Geography's The Fuck | Hacker News Reader

Geography's The Fuck

jasonpunyon.com

104 pointsJasonPunyon29 comments

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This is tough to comment on because it feels a bit loaded. I think this is an important post in its own right, something we should all be talking about, but at the same time I think its somewhat tangentially related to what raganwald was ranting about. (I'll try to comment evenly with my personal experience to tie them together, sorry about the horn-toot in the process.)

I totally agree that the importance of geography is only occasionally touched upon, usually when working-from-home topics arise.

But it's crucial.

I know a lot about canvas. I'm the top answer-er on StackOverflow for Canvas and HTML5 tags. By far. I love it, I love helping people. Because of this I get emails weekly from people with various issues and I try to reply to them as best I can. Job offers come in too, from uh, one corner of the globe (a little place called California). I reject all of them out of hand[1] because they reject me out of hand, because I won't move.

It might sound like I'd work somewhere special or prestigious (do they still say that about companies?), but I don't.

I'm a person before I'm a programmer. And I always will be. And I have a family and friends and a home in New Hampshire and I want to stay here, even if that means staying with my teeny tiny less-than-ten-person company. And I probably get paid a pittance of what I might get paid out in CA (chuckles were had when I last mentioned my salary on the phone).

But I walk seven minutes to work every day. And lunches are paid, and I feel relaxed and at home, and at noon I can go home (paid lunches, no clock) and cook eggs and swing by the cafe to find fresh coffee and see the faces Jed and Emily and Sam and Alyssa and all the others that I know and love. Just seeing some of the same people every day, people I've known for years, brings me immense joy.

I'm not curing cancer, but at the end of the day I do feel accomplished and refreshed and loved by coworkers and friends in my tiny little world.

Well. I think I've sort of lost the point I was getting at in my own head. Anyway, suggesting people merely uproot their lives seems like the height of insanity, and while many a brave soul do it, I don't think I ever could, not even for cancer-curin'.

[1] One company to date has said that not-relocating my entire life is OK with them.

I can only speak from my perspective, but the main reason I'd only click on ones that are near me is because I live in NZ, and there is little point me seeing a bunch of jobs in the valley, unless they're big fans of people working from home in vastly differing timezones.

(move to the states you say? I'm not a fan of your bread. Sorry.)

Bread? Really?

Yes, really. In a lot of places in the US what passes for bread is like processed cheese - possibly tasty, but a pale facsimile of the real thing.

"Real" bread does exist in the US, though usually only in wealthy communities, and even in those places is considered relatively boutique. Middle America's definition of bread would shock anyone coming from a bread-heavy culture.

Don't put this on Middle America. I come from a long line of German bakers who settled the American Midwest. We know just fine what good bread is.

This may be a confusion of terminology - I've always thought "Middle America" referred to middle-class, suburban America, as opposed to the Midwest in specific. If I've misused the word, my bad.

I grew up on various derivations of Wonder Bread on the West Coast, FWIW.

I've lived in a bunch of different places, and invariably good bread was only to be found in relatively wealthy areas. I suspect though, sanity in baking returns once you get rural enough.

My misunderstanding I suppose :)

Edit:

The bread gets better because when all you can afford is the materials to make bread and your time is cheap, it becomes worthwhile to optimize that process. (Sie poor)

If you don't have the surplus value to allocate to making bread, but your time is still too "valuable" to allocate towards making better bread, you eat crap bread. (Middle America)

If you have surplus value to slosh around, then fuck it. (Rich peeps)

That was maybe true in the 1970s, but I'm not so sure these days.

I don't live in the U.S. but every time I visit, I'm actually rather amazed by the wide variety of bread (and beer) even in average grocery stores, some of which looks really nice.

That's not true everywhere of course, but I suspect it's not unusual in the sort of place you're likely to find any concentration of tech companies.

The days when a loaf of wonderbread and a delicious canned meal were considered the height of sophistication are, I think, mostly behind us... :]

That was a humorous half-truth. The full truth is a lot more complex and rich with personal details that don't need to be shared with people on the Internet.

We could make up lots of good reasons for not moving though. My parents are sick and I need to be near them. My wife / girlfriend / boyfriend / life partner has a job / sick parents / other commitments where I am. The US won't let me into the country for any number of completely idiotic reasons even though I'm not a criminal (visas are hard). I have a personal objection to the TSA. The point is that for a lot of people moving very very far is legitimately either not an option, or not a very good one.

(the humorous half-truth stands though, at least the store bought stuff I've had when I've been over there. Bread should not taste like sugar...)

Very much so. I moved my family to the outskirts of Chicagoland so we'd be really close to my kids grandma. Great choice. Even though I technically can commute into Chicago everyday, the 1:15 trip can wear me down.

So even though I'm in "Chicago" I still care for a job that allows remote work. It's a quality of life issue.

I would never move to California. It just won't happen, my family is more important than working for some company that has no interest in working asynchronously.

In addition. I know that a company that has the infrastructure to support remote work, will have the infrastructure to support different hours. Most developer around here are early 20s, single, and can wake up at 9, roll into work at 10, and come home at 6.

I'm up at 6 every morning with my kid. If I get inspiration, I don't want to be held up by a restrictive process.

"Raganwald poses an interesting question. Why do some of the best minds in our industry spend time figuring out how to make people click more on ads?"

Your answer is:

"One simple answer to the question is Geography."

There are two problems with your answer:

1. He isn't asking how to get more people to click on ads, he is asking why our best minds are working on that problem.

2. Geography isn't the answer to people clicking on ads, it just happens to be very important if it's a job ad (according to your experience). There are plenty of ads that aren't for jobs and Geography is not the answer.

It is interesting to hear your findings about job ads, but the context of your post and the summary of the results don't seem to fit.

Glad I'm not the only one who caught this. The entire post is completely unrelated to Raganwald's post/question.

I think you've misunderstood the post. There are jobs available to work on "big things" and there are jobs to work on "small things". Job advertising provides a really nice set of domain specific data to work out why people are more likely to work on the "small things" then the "big things". Jason's concluded that from the data they have available that they can see that people find geography to be more important to the job they choose then the satisfaction from working on the "big things".

You and guynamedloren clearly didn't read past the second heading. The point of the article is that geography is one important factor for why people don't work at jobs that matter.

"Why do some of the best minds in our industry spend time figuring out how to make people click more on ads?...One simple answer to the question is Geography."

"Why do some of the best minds in our industry spend time figuring out how to make people click more on ads?...One important factor to answering that question is Geography."

See the difference?

Simple answers lose again!

Okay, this was a valuable and interesting rant, and I'm not knocking its general observations.

But as a specific reply to the questions literally asked in Raganwald's post, it's wrong. Maybe it's connecting with the spirit of the question, I'm not sure, but it's failing on the letter of the question.

Raganwald asked about Google, Facebook, Apple, and people "trying to remix the same five or six tired 'social' ideas in the hope of being acqui-hired". Those people mostly work in Silicon Valley. And almost all of them are immigrants to the Bay area.

Case study: On my team of 30, I think there are half a dozen people from the Bay Area, if that. And then there are Canadians, Australians, Germans, Indians, Chinese, and more (and I mean people who lived and worked in those places until a few years ago, not people whose parents were from those places). There are a lot of Ohioans, there are folks from Florida and some Carolina and Texas. Anywhere at Google, "where are you from" is a reasonable conversational gambit, because it's not here.

So, uh, no. Geography is not the reason "the greatest minds of our generation toiling away in the Googleplex [and elsewhere in Silicon Valley] ... trying to figure out how to get Scott Hanselman to click on ads [and whatever other allegedly low-value things we're doing]".

Maybe I'm an outlier, but as someone from Alabama, I'm more inclined to click on job postings from sunny California.

Just clicking on Careers 2.0 shows me one job near Tuscaloosa AL for something that doesn't sound remotely interesting (obviously that's subjective). If that showed me stuff near Huntington Beach, San Francisco, or LA - I might be inclined to click on it. In fact, and this may be an unpopular opinion or maybe you're already doing this because I don't have an account on StackOverflow, but have you thought about matching jobs to most-common programming languages searched for info? I constantly search for Objective-C information but the only listings I see on my cursory click are for C#/ASP, HTML5/CSS3, Visual C++, PHP, Systems Software Dev Lead, and jQuery Master. This does come down to privacy but we gladly give Google that info, and I trust StackOverflow if all this would be for is getting me a better job in a field I'm actively seeking information in.

For me, I would take your algorithmic approach a step further. For known tech hubs / top 100 cities (at least in the US) your approach probably works wonders. For others, I would recommend feeding in geographic locations on the coasts out of the top 100 cities, radiating inward. Also I would add the programming language filter in as well.

Again, most of this is probably terrible from a privacy standpoint and you're probably already doing it by some means. But on cursory glance, these are the things that actually matter to me when job searching.

And I know this is only tangentially related to the point of your blog post haha.

Well, "geography" apparently answers the question as to how to get more ad clicks. Not sure it had much to with the original question though, aside from the fact that we choose a job because it's there, for some relative value of there.

I think you totally missed the point: geography generated higher clicks on this ad because people were overwhelmingly more interested in the location of a job than what it was for.

Because Diabetes AutoMeters Inc™ that Raganwald thinks should get the engineering energy isn't located in the valley, it won't attract engineers from the valley. Similarly, because so many ad-driven companies are in the valley, many of the engineers that want to be (or already are) in the valley tend to end up working on advertising stuff.

From the little I've read about him, Raganwald seems like a rather smart guy so I'm fairly certain that he's well aware of the effect that various economic forces have on the decisions that people make in regards to employment/etc...

Having said that, Raganwald is essentially advocating for people to consider using their knowledge and effort on more noble causes than adding features to a website to get more clicks and make more money.

I think this post illustrates why several recent articles advocating against remote work are severely misguided.

It is marginally less efficient for your company to support remote work than to have everyone in the same place, but it's absolutely critical if we want to be able to connect the best people to the best, and most important, opportunities.

Dear HN,

given that this is a direct reply to another HN post, it might be useful to have a "submit reply post" feature that shows this entry, indented, right below the "Why the f*ck?" entry, just like in your email software or any forum.

It wouldn't increase HN real estate occupation (still two slots out of 30), it would be clear(er) what this is an answer to, although one can use links in the comments. Plus, it would make sense to have comments for the two posts in one page.

I know, easier said than done. Among the questions to be answered: what to do when the first post should get off the first page and the reply shouldn't.

Geography is certainly one of the "fucks", but there are most definitely other factors as well: compensation, culture, quality of coworkers, etc.

Let me guess - you're a male in your mid-twenties or maybe early thirties? (me too!) Once you start having a family, kids, house, etc., you're going to be far less inclined to bounce around the country or world for your job, even if those factors you mention would mean a subjectively better job.

Geography is an insufficient answer. I didn't realize there was confusion or speculation, possibly even on the part of raganwald, over why most economic activity is useless: obviously capitalism doesn't primarily select for usefulness. The fact that somebody could read raganwald's "Why The Fuck?" post and think there was some answer other than "capitalism" is beyond me.

Google is in the top three for most desirable employment among economists, engineers and lawyers (private sector) in Sweden. Google has less than 100 total employees in Sweden and most engineers in Sweden aren't even software engineers. IKEA is also in the top three. Draw your own conclusions.

After looking at your banner ad I can state that I'd be much more likely to click if the yearly salaries of the jobs were listed.

If I were to create an employment marketplace site, I would definitely make it mandatory for employers to list the salary range. Salary discussions come up way too late in the hiring process if the employer doesn't state them up front.

Bad use of geography is equally bad. I have often complained that geographical location does not directly relate to one's preferred language.

Since I am a native English speaker living in Germany, I still get Adsense ads in German, regardless of my browser Accept Language headers.

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