Stay Put, Young Man
washingtonmonthly.com
washingtonmonthly.com
The city’s tallest building, Yglesias notes, is a mere twenty-two stories high.
Anyone who lives in San Jose can tell you why this is the case. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California#Arts_and_a...
Because the downtown area is in the flight path to nearby Mineta San Jose International Airport, there is a height limit for buildings in the downtown area, which is under the final approach corridor to the airport. The height limit is dictated by local ordinances, driven by the distance from the runway and a slope defined by Federal Aviation Administration regulations. Core downtown buildings are limited to approximately 300 feet (91 m) but can get taller farther from the airport.[80]
The rest of the article did a good job of arguing that housing prices harm migration and contribute to income inequality. But twisting a fact like that makes me suspicious. Hopefully fault lies with Matt Yglesias, not the author.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Sa...
To be fair to him though, its a hard line to walk when you are discussing the kind of complex open-ended issues which he does. I think his writing has done good to stir up thinking and provoke responses on some of the issues he discusses.
He got lots of bad reviews because he pissed off some right-wing folks who showed up in droves to write bad reviews about the book out of spite, not because they'd actually read it or thought about it:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/06/andrew-breitbart-fa...
Discussions of the propriety of his comments are probably best left to other web sites, and kept off of this one.
I've worked remotely for big American companies like Motorola (I live in Sweden) and continue to work from home for local Swedish companies. Almost all the people I interface with are in various offices in various timezones around the world anyway.
I also do game programming jams e.g. Ludum Dare over a weekend occasionally, and these are also distributed remote efforts. Yet we manage to work at a furious pace with the same immediacy and accessibility as if we were sitting in the same room.
It works well. It works well for me, and I believe it can be made to work well in general.
This is not just about IT type jobs; most office-work can be done remotely. Only people actually manipulating machinery directly need to be in physical contact with their machine.
But there is a definite distrust and dislike of it, especially among management types.
Remotely, a lot of potential communication gets dropped and you have to do a lot of active effort to get status and so on. It's basically more work to manage remote workers. Just like its more work to have your team spread throughout a building or on another floor.
There is also the micro-management aspect of it, where they can shoulder surf and make sure people are only doing work activities. Some people probably get some sort of emotional satisfaction in telling people what to do in person too.
Timezones can be annoying for communication. Anybody who has to do 8pm india/china meetings can tell you that.
Also, the software for real-time collaboration sucks. Even if you constantly screen-share and video chat, it's not as good as working in the same room. Simple things like pointing at a section of code are difficult to do, and synchronizing files can be a pain.
I'm working on solving this (Floobits YC S13 yadda yadda), but there's still much to be done.
I don't know if they used standard software for this, or whether it was their own cobbled-together scripts with normal screen-sharing apps like vnc. I was not involved in setting it up. But it worked very well.
I recall discussing using mosix (that's how old it was) too, so we were a big beowulf cluster for compiles etc. That appealed to them, but I don't know if it was acted on after I moved on.
In this particular case it wasn't about monitoring, this was about collaboration. But you can see how such a system would appeal to managers too.
This complete lack of privacy took some getting used to, but it was super focusing. It quickly sunk in that everything you did (on your screen) was visible to everyone else, and whilst there was toleration for reading the news and so on, everyone was self-censoring themselves to apply themselves.
This was in an open-plan office, but with modern bandwidth could work well remotely.
* To use shared sources for things (company/department wide Wikis, bug-trackers etc) instead of c:/my_docs/spec.v1.docx being mailed about.
* Reduce the number of meetings (Which, in my experience, are usually unnecessary in a software-dev environment at least)
Obviously some roles are going to be less amenable to Remote working but without the above 2 (or even the first bit) done most companies couldn't even do it if they wanted.
Say the remote worker builds you a shaky RoR+MongoDB app, no scalability, no error handling, no tests, no comments. At least in the short run, it works - there are occasional outages, but the worker (remote or otherwise) does a great job keeping it going. Then the remote worker quits. What do you do?
Just because something is behind an API doesn't mean you don't have to worry about knowledge transfer, code quality, etc.
The real distinction between a network API and a library is that the network API allows users to avoid thinking about the hardware. The API provider is responsible for allocating hardware, the user need only send messages over the network to use it. I.e., buying hard drives is Amazon's problem, I just GET/PUT my files onto S3.
If the API isn't hardware intensive, this is pointless - you are adding network overhead (i.e., latency, network errors) for nothing.
A network API lets you mix and match languages, share the functionality among different/distant teams, etc.
I have read somewhere that was the Amazon way of doing thing but it was a costly investment. A costly technological investment. And even Amazon did it only at team level, not individual level.
I cannot imagine a 500 developers company being able to afford that without some serious competitive advantages down the line. If what I can see around here is any indication (medium size IT company in London), if you can afford not having people on site, there are better opportunities to take in Poland or even India than a small discount on a UK worker.
If your work can be reduced to such an API, then I'd argue that you can be replaced with a script. Most jobs, however, even today, are far more complex than that. As a very obvious example, culture is an extremely important aspect of building a successful business, and a person's contribution to culture is irreducibly complex and unmeasurable, and untameable to stating an API type contract.
I meant the remote worker builds and maintains an API, not that he himself is an API.
> culture is an extremely important aspect of building a successful business
Yes, maybe; but there are many businesses that are already built and that would benefit from treating some parts of their process as self-enclosed APIs.
I would go so far as saying many already do, without knowing it.
What happens in practise is that a feature or bugfix might require a large change to one part of the code and a much smaller change in another.
So the developer tasked with the small change will finish before the other. Now you have an idle developer and an overloaded developer holding the process up. If you have a process whereby the idle developer can't share some of the workload of the other you are going to have very inefficient development.
You also run into problems if one developer is on holiday , off sick or leaves the company since nobody else has ever looked at their code.
There's also a risk of bringing politics into re-factoring decisions. "This functionality should be part of your API".
It's also undervaluing the importance of _communication_ in work.
If one person commits and pushes, others in the same workspace have to stash, pull, and stash pop. That doesn't always work, since people might edit files in the workspace during the stash/pull/pop. It also doesn't solve the problem of people being on different branches.
We're planning on making our plugins and tools more git-aware. Syncing much of .git would help things quite a bit. We're also toying with the idea of making each workspace a git repo, but that's farther off.
Like I said, there's still much to be done. :)
Sure there is. The process is similar to all the WinXP to Linux migrations going on. The intermediary step to OS migration is cross-platform applications. The intermediary step to remoting is to phase out everything that is based on paper or face to face communication.
Based on my experiences with heavily collaborative remote work, the gains are tremendous. Local efforts do not scale when when you get an influx of people. Remote processes do. And even for locals, the remote tech works better and faster than the old methods. (Of course a group of locals still get a bonus to communication and are often more productive than a bunch of individual remotes.)
I'm not convinced this is true: the biggest problem seems to be the way knowledge spills over from person to person when they're in close proximity to each other, and the way new ideas often appear from serendipitous encounters. Popular books like Steven Berlin Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City discuss the issue in greater detail and cite much of the original research on this phenomenon.
Some of that original research attempts to measure knowledge transfers by proxy, like the way patents tend to cite other patents whose authors live nearby. It's not perfect but it is pretty compelling. Other research relies on descriptions of famous people describing how chance encounters fertilized their ideas.
I'm working on solving this (Floobits YC S13 yadda yadda), but there's still much to be done.
Very cool. If you haven't read Johnson's book in particular you should!
Another fun thing you see in Sweden is prefabricated houses. In England, prefabs have a horrid reputation from the war years, but modern Swedish houses and flats are assembled from large prefabricated sections that arrive on a lorry and are assembled in just a day or two.
Prefab has been a force particularly in commercial and industrial construction in the US for some time. My company has done a lot of work in the design and construction of standardized/commoditized hospital rooms, for example. It makes construction like an exercise in Legos :-)
Not saying it's not possible to move somewhere sight unseen and without health insurance (since that's presumably what older generations did) but it's still much higher risk than staying put.
There are things like COBRA (http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/faqs/faq-consumer-cobra.html) that help to bridge the gap in coverage.
I hear all the excuses for them not moving. It's too expensive, they'll uproot their families, etc. Do you think our grandparents didn't have those problems when they moved from the south to the rust belt to take those long-gone factory jobs?
It used to be people moved to where the jobs were. Now they are content to stay where the checks come.
Now you can trade a grind in one settled area for a slightly more profitable grind in another. With the tradeoff of losing contact with your whole social milieu and having to start a lot of things from scratch in the new place, while you're surrounded by people who have a lot more than you because they've been grinding in that place for years.
Not appealing, so it's no surprise that it's mainly the highly-educated who can a) seek high value economic opportunities and b) are guaranteed a welcoming social reception from university or work colleagues :)
People like us should be more generous about the incentives governing the lives of the new post-mobility local cultures.
The mobility which my parents enjoyed was really tied to a reasonable cost of housing across the places they lived and a stable job market. My Dad generally could stay in one company for 9 years without moving. And he's never experienced a layoff. The one time he came close was due to an acquisition where the acquiring company offered every engineer a full relocation package to move to the midwest OR a 1 year severance to find a new job.
I look at the situation today, and I find the picture to be very different. Many housing markets are largely out of reach, many hiring companies are extremely volatile, and the salary differences across state lines are modest when compared to cost of living differences.
When things are like that, it's hard to justify moving and losing a social circle, uprooting kids, and being farther away from family members.
The wages for construction workers will go up and the situation should correct itself automatically. Unfortunately, it will take some time for people to adjust their cultures so that construction workers are valued more socially - like people who write term sheets.
Construction workers don't make a lot of money, but they aren't the poor migrant workers living in dirty dorms. They are the working class.
My uncle was doing construction, then just decided to start his own construction business rather than work for someone else, and makes very very good money doing that.
Every year the US Dept of Labor produces the Occupational Outlook Handbook which contains information about occupations in the US. Salaries, number employees, job outlook, etc. These are median salaries.
Construction Laborers and Helpers $28,410 per year http://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/construct...
Now, if you get more specialized, you earn more:
Roofers: $34,220 per year http://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/roofers.h...
Drywall and Ceiling Tile Installers, and Taper: $38,290 per year http://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/drywall-a...
Construction Equipment Operators: $39,460 per year http://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/construct...
Historically, construction has been seen as a union job, and that's probably still true in certain parts of the U.S. and in certain specializations.
As far as housing arrangements, I'm not positive, but I do believe immigrants tend to pack in more people per square foot of an apartment. I have not heard of dorm-style arrangements run by employers.
For better or worse, the reason any random person off the street can't raise enough capital to start a bank, VC fund, or other capital-intensive project is lack of trust. Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, etc. have trust; you don't.
That being said, it would be interesting to see a graphic of commute time and wage/salary to see the tradeoffs people make.
If you don't pay rent (eg you live with parents), its probably a net win. If you don't consume much housing (eg, 4 person house share), it might still be a net win. Also, some people are more flexible than other in their consumption which is influenced by relative price. So, they might consume less housing by house sharing but more iphones and clothes.
Try figure out if a 22 year old barista living in a trendy city centre with 3 housemates, but a nice nice budget for gadgets and clothes is better off then one in a small town with a completely different lifestyle. Its extremely subjective.
The typical person in the job market has a spouse or children. Having to have multiple roommates on top of that is generally considered a nonstarter.
When you say, "If you don't consume much housing...," you're saying, "If you're single and unattached..." And it's only a net win as long as you stay that way, which isn't usually the case.
To connect the dots the rest of the way, when housing prices shoot through the roof, people with families and special needs get pushed out. What is left are people with fixed housing costs and single people who don't see having many roommates as being a quality of life issue.
Personally, having recently conducted an interstate move, I think it is a combination of the lack of specialization (My career as a programmer was going fine elsewhere) and cost of living as mentioned in the article. Moving is expensive, especially when you have an underwater house, and it's hard to leave your social network behind. If you're moving for a raise from $18/hour in Ohio to $25/hour in San Francisco, that's not worth it.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/america-is-flat/
"[W]ithin the United States, at least, people are moving less — a lot less. Greg Kaplan and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl (pdf) say that interstate mobility has been cut in half over the past 20 years. And interestingly, they suggest that this is in part because regions have become more similar: increasingly, different parts of the country are producing the same kinds of things and employing the same kind of people, so that there’s less reason to move.
This story actually matches up with what the new economic geography literature says, which is that regional specialization peaked around a century ago and has been declining since."
This article rests on the premise that all you need for a higher salary is to live somewhere where salaries are higher. But that is highly questionable -- just because they're higher in general, doesn't mean they'll be higher for you. At no point does the author convincingly explain that American unemployment is a problem of geographical mismatch, instead of the far more likely case of skills mismatch.
> If labor markets were operating efficiently, construction workers, along with electricians, plumbers... would receive enough compensation to live near the places where their work is most needed. But our labor markets are not efficient; rather, they are rigged and skewed, offering too much compensation to people with some skill sets (merging companies and writing derivatives, for example) and not enough to others whose skills are often just as hard to learn (e.g., brick laying and teaching children to read) and often more vital to society.
What? How exactly does the author magically come to the conclusion? As far as I can tell, construction work and plumbing and electrical wiring is all getting done. (Never listen to businessmen complaining about a lack of workers, it's just a masked complaint that they're having to pay higher wages.) What evidence is there that our labor markets are "rigged and skewed"? By whom? It's like the author doesn't understand the basic concepts of supply and demand in a labor market.
It's extremely interesting that Americans are moving less. I'd love to know more of why. But tying it into arguments about career mobility seems highly dubious, at best. It's ridiculous, and almost patronizing, to suppose that people's careers nationwide are being held back by not being able to live in downtown metro areas. It's a big country out there.
If it were a case of either of those, it would be visible in the data. Which it isn't. American unemployment - and European unemployment, for that matter - is a result of the class warfare practiced by the rich against the poor in recent years. Paul Krugman suggests Republican policies are responsible for 2% extra unemployment, nationwide:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/the-gop-tax/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/what-a-drag-2/
High unemployment is a result of policies that have artificially suppressed demand for goods and services by taking money out of the hands of people who will actually spend it, resulting in an overall excess supply of labor and low demand for labor and therefore, low wages.
Taking wage data from the massive tech bubble is some serious cherry picking.
Earlier in the same paragraph:
> "in 2005 the [San Jose] metro area approved permits for only 5,700 new units"
Again, this also cherry picking, as the area was just coming out of one of its biggest busts-- the aftermath of the tech bubble (the number of tech jobs is still not as high as it was in 2000). Although one would never know it from reading the piece.
The U.S. is a big place and locations with crazy housing costs are not the norm. I would think that most people moving for a job would already have a job available. I suppose there are plenty of cases where people might move without a job offer in advance because anything would be an improvement.
Maybe today people don't move as often simply because EVERYTHING is getting more expensive while the jobs people could land are staying the same or getting worse. Moving is quite expensive, especially when you don't have a job and especially when you don't have a job lined up at the place you are moving to. Gas is expensive for moving long distances. Getting into a house or an apartment is expensive. How many jobless people have the savings to withstand all this?
It would also be interesting to see more statistics. For example, where were people moving to and from when the rates were the highest? What industries were supporting the places these people moved to? Maybe the decline of jobs that could take just about anyone, in large numbers and paid well (manufacturing) contributed to the decline in mobility. There really isn't anything which could take the place of engineering.
Though people may be less mobile today, the options for that mobility will always be great. The U.S. is a huge nation with a lot of diversity. You can't really compare mobility in a nation like the U.S. with 50 states to a small country like that of Denmark or Sweden.
If you compute absolute population growth from 1969 to 2011 on a per-county basis, using publicly available demographic stats, the top-20 winners are
----
Arizona Mohave 7.38100563286945
Georgia Paulding 7.4570788900017675
Virginia Loudoun 7.954704312171496
Georgia Henry 8.023498694516972
Texas Hood 8.128975265017667
Florida Collier 8.313786154239164
Texas Denton 8.504770344932634
Georgia Fayette 8.909350004596856
Texas Montgomery 9.526487258446021
Utah Washington 10.029741513547181
Florida Hernando 10.384018414995067
Georgia Forsyth 10.637015231025215
Florida Osceola 10.880533448053345
Texas Rockwall 10.907133440749963
Georgia Gwinnett 11.063892016788289
Texas Fort Bend 11.168507788849015
Texas Williamson 11.323119312014695
Colorado Summit 11.39344262295082
Texas Collin 11.507137247655564
Florida Flagler 21.135939986360537
Colorado Douglas 36.49576488706366
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Generally speaking, the South is a big winner - GA, TX, FL, AZ...
3139 counties ranked by population growth in my github repo here - http://bit.ly/16RsjWa
Here's some Scala code for crunching this data yourself : http://bit.ly/1hZDQny
I think for the average person (who, let's remind, is probably part of a household making $50k or less per year) cost of living (and particularly housing) is what matters more than taxes or wages.
Income in areas of high housing costs more than offsets those costs, so that the net result is ($income - $housing) is higher
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2011/12/us-cities-w...
My big takeaway here is that America is not and never has been one country. In Europe we are wringing our hands that the Southern states are too poor and being carried by the richer North, that migration must be controlled lest we depopulate a country and why can't we be more like America who just seems to go from strength to strength
yet, it's not true - all we fear in Europe apparently happens in the US anyway - different areas have different economic cycles, mass migration, vastly different state laws and yet it seems to balance out ...
Oddly I guess Anerica is a small working example of Keynes' International Monetary Fund - perhaps call the Fed a Continental Monetary Reserve.
It also suggests that acting more like a proper country might not be very good for you.
edit: The IMF was originally conceive as a way to balance out economic cycles - countries would pay in in good times, draw down in bad times. It seems however that politicans like the spend in bad times, but happily forget the pay in in good times part.
See here: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/California-shows-increase...
I wonder if the split across gender lines is still the same.