So to now come out and say "look at all the remote hiring we're doing" sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Yeah, because you have no choice!

The talent has realized they have all the cards and bargaining power in terms of remote work right now. Anyone who is fighting to return to the office is missing the point. We should all be striving to unlock permanent mobility within our professions.

This is one of the most understated things about remote work. I hate when the arguments for the benefits of remote work all seem to end with "well you don't have to sit in traffic". It's way way more than that.

* I just moved across the country. I didn't hate where I lived but it was meh, moved to Colorado where I'm now going skiing every weekend and a general 180 for my lifestyle.

* I'm planning far more trips. If my office is now my laptop so who says I can't do it from anywhere. I just came back from a few weeks in Hawaii and planning another trip to the Keys in a month or so. I work my regular hours in all of these places.

How I look at work has completely and diametrically shifted in the last 2 years, and it's made me a much more active and healthier person. It's honestly hard to believe how one change in my career (going remote) has been in service of all of this.

Without kindergarten I don't see how you could work full time and take care of a kid under 6 years old. Especially not the first 2-3 years.

In the end, you likely don't lock your knives away, and you can bet that your kids know where they are.

My work location exceeds anything any other company could possibly provide me. Except, maybe I don't have snacks sitting around all the time, I don't get free lunches.. and, I don't have a ping pong table to challenge my co-workers at.

I miss a few of those things, but, generally, I'm happier working at home.

What if my aging parents get sick and I want to spend time with them? Maybe my partner doesn't have the ability to work remotely and needs to relocate for work? What if I develop a health condition that can be improved by location (climate, air quality, distance to medical center)? All of these can be pretty stressful situations and apply to all ages. Do I really want to be forced to find another job or deal with possible financial insecurities during any of these?

So I'd correct your phrasing: "The talent in the US have all the cards and bargaining power". So the "smart" thing companies are doing is find talent outside the US.

And also before anyone mentions lower quality devs (for which I have an eye roll and a "get over yourself"), I've worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there's next to no difference in quality.

I think FAANG developers have protected themselves from that by normalizing leetcode-style interviews. Absolute majority of developers here in Eastern Europe are not prepared to implement some knapsack algorithm on whiteboard in 20 minutes (yes, even the good ones!).

Well, of course it can! I presume this is how absolute majority of FAANG devs got there in the first place (judging from the popularity of leetcode, CtCI, etc.). It is just that people who have time, ability and motivation to "game" (e.g. learn) all of the required skills (leetcode-style questions, distributed systems design (even for positions that have nothing to do with distributed systems), behavioral (remember, here in Eastern Europe people don't always behave in typical American "happy-positive" ways, in fact you would be considered weird by your coworkers if you do that, but you will fail an interview to FAANG-type companies if you tell them straight up that your boss was an asshole or the code was complete crap) and don't forget about good written and spoken English) usually aim to move to western countries, because why would they chose to work for peanuts on remote (did you see Google salaries in Poland? I assume they will pay similarly for remote positions if you happen to live in that location).

For a small or medium company it may also be a bit more work to handle foreign employment laws and tax laws.

Sure. But if your company is not a Tier-1 or Tier-2 company. You will not have access to those quality developers... at least in India.

There is. The best devs are equal as developers, but local developers have an intuitive understanding of the market and so will make good decisions for the future without needing to be told, while remote ones won't have that feel and so will write code that doesn't scale. Note that remote and local is relative to your target market. If you want to sell to Poland then developers in Poland have the advantage, if you want to tell to the world you need developers from all over the world to capture as many different cultures as you can.

I don't know about Poland, but I know in India there are a lot of bad developers who wouldn't even try to be a developer in the US. This is nothing about their best developers who are just as good as anyone else but you have to shift through more bad ones. (There are a lot of bad ones in the US as well, just not as many)

Sorry but that makes no sense to me. There are good developers and bad developers. Doesn't matter where they're from.

If you're talking about "understanding of the market" that has nothing to do with development. Might make a difference if you want the 1 man startup kind of person, but still, that has nothing to do with actual development. I sincerely don't understand how you can equate lack of knowledge of a local market with writing code that doesn't scale.

Hiring developers for their understanding of the market sounds to me like you're not in need of a developer. Even then, once a good developer gets into a specific market he'll learn it just like a local developer would.

For some anecdotal evidence, I've never set foot outside of my country (Brazil) and worked with very few US developers that are in the same ballpark as me. I've met people from the Philippines, Greece, Sweden and many other countries that are better. Country is a non-factor.

IMO being a good developer has nothing to do with the zip code you were born in. People become good developers if they're invested in it and work on it. Maybe you're a tad better if you were born with the right genes, but 99% of it is self-improvement.

I've given plenty of ideas that were profitable, relevant to the product, market and vision of the company. Yet I never lived anywhere close to those markets.

Maybe you had contact with only low quality developers of other countries or we're not speaking about the same thing here...

On the contrary, I feel like HN has a hard time admitting that remote work didn’t conquer the workplace like we were told it would at the beginning of the pandemic.

Finding remote jobs is definitely a little bit easier now, but actually getting those jobs seems to be even harder than ever now that everybody is competing for them. Some companies are embracing remote, but it seems many more are eager to get back to in-office work as soon as reasonable.

I am seeing a lot more smaller tech companies and smaller firms that are embracing remote. The small companies where there aren't multiple layers of management, where cancelling an office lease is a big improvement to the owner. They are going remote. I also took a remote tech job, and it seems more innovative companies are embracing remote.

My prediction, which may be wrong, is that traditional companies that go back into the office are going to face strong attrition to remote companies. And companies that go remote are also going to get a huge benefit in talent. I know a lot of really great engineers that do not want to move to SF/Seattle/NYC/Boston. There are great engineers in small towns and cities that like to live near friends and family, and get good salaries for the area (that are lower than big companies). These people are going to go to the remote first companies, leave their old stodgy companies. This is a huge boon for companies that are willing to take it.

Your prediction is right that remote work might benefit small companies, but there is a big risk. As soon as those companies grow to a decent size, then they middle management layers which is typically imported from outside. In a remote-only setup with no opportunity to form strong connections, small innovative companies may find it hard to transition to big established giants.

> it seems more innovative companies are embracing remote

maybe because early stage companies, who do not have communication overhead find it easy to embrace remote and such companies are more innovative by their nature? If that is true, then a real test will come when these companies need to scale.

This is not my observation and experience. I've worked "remote" for 20 years. During that time I've noticed a gradual increase in the prevalence and acceptance of remote work, to the point where around 2017 it was common to have "remote-only" organizations. I worked in a few of those. But there were still "remote-mixed" organizations where as a remote participant you were usually calling in to the dreaded Polycom-in-a-meeting-room (or the modern Google Hangouts equivalent).

What I have seen since 2020 is that the "remote-mixed" orgs converted to "remote-only". They no longer have meeting participants in meeting rooms. They're all online. They have been hiring people wherever they can find them, rather than beard-stroking about whether they can handle another remote worker or not. The result, at least at the places I can see into, is that I am skeptical that they will ever truly go back to how it was. How, for example, can you have meetings where the majority of participants are in a room, when you spent 2 years hiring ex-Amazon people in Seattle and ex-Google people in NYC, and your headquarters is in the city (SF)?

First it was OK for exceptional cases where the person was really important or had some medical-ish rationale. Then ten years later all those remotes were "normalized" and people got home-office subsidies. Then Covid hit and it was WFH everybody temporarily. Then Covid obviously wasn't going away maybe ever, and it was "hybrid" which I read as "manager decides." Now the workforce is making demands and we'll see where that leads.

(Ironically enough I turned down a job last year because it was on-site and would require a move, and then Covid didn't go away and they closed that office and put everyone on remote.)

I believe it was Andreessen who said over and over again that proximity is a competitive advantage and thus startups will always favor it and by extension so will the Valley. I don't even disagree with the premise, but it sure looks like people are going to "route around" that advantage in order to capture other advantages for the foreseeable (forever-Covid?) future.

I don't believe hybrid with some full remote some not can work. You can do everyone in the office on specific days (M-F, or only Tuesday...), but I don't think a mix can work.

Back in 2013 I might have wanted to live in the Bay Area despite how already costly it was. Today, I make far more than I did back then and there's no way in hell I'm living in the Bay Area both for financial and cultural reasons.

What you're saying isn't as ubiquitous as you might think. I left my last company because remote work was "just temporary" for more than a year and I was unable to plan my life around "just temporary" remote work. What you perceive as choiceless is still a choice (being badly made) by many companies.

The other large companies I've interviewed at for the past couple years definitely felt like they tacked on remote work because of COVID, and I wasn't confident it would last once the pandemic calmed down.

Which is to say i don't trust full remote to last.

It's not mobility if you're being forced to work in a way that doesn't suit you. If everyone is remote, then the x% of developers that don't want to be remote are left without an alternative.

This is true not because we are human, but because we are living things.

“The whole world is made of people who didn’t kill themselves today. Life can get very difficult, very sad, very upsetting… but you don’t have to do it. You really don’t have to do it… because you can kill yourself.” Louis CK

Any bad thing I have to do, I am putting myself through. Agency is freeing.

Unless a company has infinite budgets and plans to maintain small org sizes forever, keeping your entire workforce in the Bay Area doesn’t really scale.

The real question to ask is: Where are these new jobs? Remote? Satellite offices? New foreign offices? Remote is the hot topic, but I haven’t actually seen as many remote listings as I expected given all of the talk. For many of these companies, it could be as simple as opening new offices in other cities. If they’re opening offices in expensive locations like Seattle or NYC then it’s not really about cost of living.

On the other hand, if they really are embracing remote and hiring out of non-traditional locations then maybe it is more about cost of hiring. However, in that case I’ve personally experienced companies become eager to skip the US altogether and start hiring in even cheaper international locations with untapped talent. It’s complicated.

> Talent in the Bay Area are fetching astonishing pay ($600k for L6)

While it’s true that top Bay Area engineers can fetch $600K, it’s much more rare than it can look. Take a look at the median compensation for software engineers in the Bay Area some time. It’s a fraction of that number. Those ultra high paying FAANG jobs aren’t the typical software job, even in the Bay Area.

> A fried of mine refused to interview for position like that despite being very junior! She decided the cost of living is not worth it.

Top Bay Area compensation should be enough to offset the higher cost of living for someone living in an apartment. The cost of living for something like a 1 or even 2-bedroom apartment is negligible for someone who can get into a FAANG job in the Bay.

On the other hand, taking a median software job in the Bay Area is definitely not worth the cost of living increase, IMO, unless you’re using it as a pivot into a FAANG level job later.

Living in Amsterdam, NL, I can say that I've started seeing A LOT more opportunities from American companies in the last 12 months.

From top of my head: Netflix, Meta, Github, Stripe, Plaid, Lemonade, Box, Amazon - they all target developers in Amsterdam on LinkedIn (some offer "remote anywhere" options, but still put Amsterdam as location to show up in search results)

It's a lot harder for these companies to hire in London now, so they've been somewhat forced to find new European places (most of which already had small sales/policy offices already).

Many companies don't openly advertise remote for all positions, but companies are so starved for experienced talent that if a good remote candidate applied with 5+ yr exp, they would be very happy to consider it (modulo restrictions in timezone / country due to paperwork involved)

Without sounding controversial. Most promotions and good things at a job come from people skills rather than technical. And if you can get into the "Good old boys" club or just make friends, then you usually succeed. WFH doesn't really have those options, so not only does the company not want you to WFH, you also arn't making connections and relationships.

After hearing some horror stories from people who took the jump earlier in Covid, I decided against it, since it's exactly what you said. 100 % stagnation.

Although, the only people I have heard doing well are our sysadmins/IT friends. They are very asynchronous and can easily work 3 jobs with no conflicts and are doing very well.

A few observations:

- Often there are already many remote people in the company, and the lack of "remote ok" on job posting might be simply due to: 1) overlook; 2) not wanting too many otherwise unsuitable applicants, perhaps; 3) they may have one job post for generic 'sw dev' position while they try to recruit 100 people to 50 teams; some teams behind this are more remote-ok, others are less

- In my current company, quite a few folks have recently moved away from high cost of living HQ city to smaller city, staying as remote, and got mortgages etc. which means they won't move back.

Definitely before joining, you need to ask questions and ideally find a team which is already 100% remote or close; being the only remote person in a team will suck.

not too familiar with the Bay Area - are median companies not already priced out due to the CoL and inability to compete on salary? or are the only remnants VC funded startups that are less sensitive to that?

Contrary to what you read on Blind, HN, and other websites, there are actually a lot of engineers in the Bay Area who aren’t interested in crushing it 24/7 and are happy to take a comfy job as long as it pays the bills and nobody bothers them to much, just like any other location.

That said, most of the median-paid engineers I’ve managed (remotely) in the Bay Area had other contributors to their situation, like having bought a house there 20 years ago or inherited a house from their parents. I don’t think it’s a good idea for anyone to move to the Bay Area now for a median-pay job there unless they really, really want to live in the Bay Area. And some people do! It’s actually a fun place to be, especially if you’re young. Not perfect, obviously, but very fun if you play your cards right.

What was the point then? "Come for the tech" sure and leave because of anything/everything else.

One of many reasons I will never set foot in the US with the intent to stay: Y'all are nuts

I've recently done two searches for remote jobs. One in late 2020/early 2021 and another late 2021. The difference is monumental. For the first one almost everyone was "remote until Covid is over". Now the majority are "remote first" and almost all the hold outs have some amount of remote first teams. Almost nobody at this point has a hard requirement that generic coders must be in the office.

California has some of the most stringent COVID restrictions in the US, and also the highest costs of living when looking at Bay Area and LA. There's no point to bring people there, especially if they're just going to working from home for the foreseeable future anyways.

I've been remote for several years (pre-COVID). For $600k, they could hire 2 or 3 engineers where I live, still doubling or tripling the local tech pay, and give those engineers the opportunity to buy (or build) and pay off a house in a few years.

Note that the Bay Area (and SF especially) has had the best Covid outcomes of any metro area in the USA with the exception of Honolulu, with like 1/3 the deaths of most other places.

Bay Area Covid response (both government action and individual choices and behavior) has saved a lot of local residents’ lives and prevented a lot of future chronic illness.

Or to put it more starkly, if everywhere in the US were as on the ball as the Bay Area, at least 500,000 more Americans would still be alive.

Note that Austin county is not related to the city of Austin, Texas. The city of Austin is in Travis county, which has had 118 confirmed Covid deaths per 100k, pretty much the best results anywhere in Texas. (Because people in Austin have also been cautious, and the local government has taken what actions it could despite state-level opposition.)

More importantly, perhaps, the peaks (for NYC, Austin, or most other places) occurred in either the heat of the summer, or the depths of winter. If you compare the deaths in SF to the deaths in other cities when the weather was similar, you don't see much difference.

In pre-omicron waves, the virus got to dense exposure in one place then spread geographically outward like a wave or fire (omicron has moved too fast for that pattern to be as visible). For example NYC, Boston, etc. were the initial epicenter in early 2020 (Seattle and the Bay Area also had plenty of early cases but strong reactions flattened the curve); the fall/winter 2020 wave pretty much started at the Sturgis motorcycle rally then spread outward across much of the country from South Dakota; and Florida was the initial epicenter for the Delta variant, which later spread throughout the south, then later on to the northeast, midwest, and west. These geographic waves of infection have perhaps as much to do with epidemic timing as local weather patterns. But severity of each wave has more to do with local social responses than with precise start timing.

County by county or state by state comparisons in the USA are pretty stark (>5x difference between best vs. worst results), but are still limited to a large extent by common features of the federal response, American media environment, etc. If you look at international comparisons, there are 20x or 50x differences in outcome between countries caused by more starkly differing policy responses (obviously lower income countries are much more constrained than high income countries, but within each category some countries have had much worse policy response than others). Countries with fast, coordinated responses who empowered health officials, communicated clearly to the public, and dedicated the necessary resources ended up doing very well in comparison to those who made excuses, blamed others, misinformed the public, sat on their hands, and prioritized politics over health.

The relative policy differences between California and Florida did not switch back and forth. The weather did, and it repeats from year to year. It would be nice to imagine that we always have control, but the actual data suggests that it's mostly a placebo. Other than vaccines, nothing humans have done has had much of an impact on the progress of the disease. The differences you refer to (e.g. Vermont) are largely explained by population density (the population of New Hampshire, for example, is about twice as much in the same area).

If policy such as you describe had a big impact, then we would not see Sweden with a lower per capita mortality than France. Actually, while Sweden is slightly less, they've been very close the entire pandemic, and their policies are very different. If you used the same criteria for policy that you would for, say, a vaccine or a treatment, you would reject it as ineffective.

State policy only goes so far. Both CA and FL have a mix of communities full of careful people with okay-to-good leadership and places full of people fed a steady media diet of misinformation with mostly failed leadership. Florida had every possible advantage going into the pandemic, especially mild weather year around that lets people e.g. eat outside, but the state government completely flubbed the response. CA also had plenty of state failures: the policies about “reopening” were poorly timed, poorly targeted, and not responsive enough to changing circumstances.

What ultimately matters is people’s behavior at the individual level. Federal policy, state policy, and local policy can strongly influence this (e.g. by sharing good advice and accurate information, providing financial resources, supplying equipment and services, doing contact tracing, coordinating relief, ...) but in the USA there are plenty of individual people who have failed in their basic duty to society spread throughout the country.

> Florida was higher in summer 2021 wave - California is higher now

Florida was the literal initial epicenter of the 2021 delta wave in the US. It was seeded there (among other places) because Florida is a major travel hub, but got so bad because Florida is under-vaccinated and people didn’t take basic precautions compared to other initial seed sites. The Bay Area almost completely dodged Delta due to vaccinations and precautions while the under-vaccinated the CA central valley got hammered.

Now with omicron, people throughout the US have largely given up on non-vaccine interventions and the vaccine doesn’t perfectly protect against infection, so somewhere on the order of half of the population of both states (and every other) is going to get infected, but the number of hospitalizations and deaths in both states will almost entirely consist of unvaccinated people. Places in both states where people are vaccinated will be fine, while the FL panhandle and the CA central valley will get wrecked.

There are a bunch of US states with significantly lower population density than Vermont but significantly worse results. Or if you want somewhere to compare to the US that isn’t Vermont, the Bay Area, or Hawaii, look at most parts of Canada vs. most parts of the US. (Note, population density of Canada as a whole is not really relevant here, as most of the people live in a narrow urban band near the border.) Canada has generally had far fewer deaths than the US, even if we compare areas right across the border from each-other.

Sweden has had horrible results compared to its comparable neighbors (Finland, Norway, and Denmark). They backed off of their initial failed policy, but not before costing a lot of lives. Fortunately the Swedish public is generally more cautious than the leadership. And fortunately they ended up getting most people vaccinated (better than Finland which saw most of its pandemic deaths in 2021). Of course, the USA has done about 2.5x worse than Sweden.

> nothing humans have done has had much of an impact on the progress of the disease

This is empirically nonsense, and also a horrible attitude toward public health crises. What is true is that a public health intervention today that ends after 3 months won’t save someone in 6 months. Vaccination is much more permanent than social distancing.

Places where people universally wear masks (the higher quality the better) consistently have lower reproductive rate of the virus. Places where indoor dining was closed dramatically reduced the reproductive rate of the virus. Places where people started working from home, doing virtual school, closing public transit, etc. dramatically reduced the reproductive rate of the virus. Etc. There are hundreds of peer reviewed papers analyzing these trends; they aren’t a mystery.

Places where there was initial masking, quick mobilization of testing, a coordinated contact tracing effort, isolation for the sick, quarantine for travelers, support for the out of work, etc. did relatively very well (e.g. China, South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, ...). We are talking about >10x fewer deaths than they might have had.

The problem in most of the US and most of Europe is that interventions came too slow, and when they were relaxed, in many places priorities have been wrong: useless interventions have sometimes been persisted (sanitizing surfaces, 6 feet of distance, masks outdoors) while the most important ones (esp. the closure of indoor bars/restaurants) were scrapped, and not enough was invested into getting people better masks, improving indoor ventilation, ensuring sick people stay home, etc. The criteria for re-instating social distancing and masking was based on the wrong metrics with thresholds set too high, and so lagged necessary response timing by weeks if not months. Political pressure and misinformation has overridden public health departments.

I lived in NYC till 2021. It's a global city, unlike SF, where COVID hit early and hard. It's a highly concentrated city as well, that few other places can rival. It's not a car town, that forces people closer.

By all oranges to oranges comparison - Bay Area isn't a standout.

NYC got unlucky being the first place in the US with significant spread (and being a dense, transit-dependent city), but local and state government also severely fucked up the initial response, reacting too slowly and not aggressively enough (e.g. if NYC schools had closed a few weeks earlier, it would have saved a huge number of residents’ lives, but the mayor was afraid closing schools would make him look bad). And NYC in 2020 could have easily been twice as bad as it was, if it had reacted even later than it did.

The lesson here is that public health response matters, public health officials should be empowered, and political leaders should act as fast as possible instead of dithering around and trying to pass blame.

If you mean population density, New York isn't even particularly competitive once you get out of the USA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_cities_by_popula...

I lived for 8 years in SF without once driving a car, so I'm not sure what the "car town" thing means in this case.

And yes NYC is a global city but not more than LA is. Per the NYT, LA had 277 deaths per 100K and NYC had 435. Not sure what the argument is here.

People working public-facing jobs or indoor jobs with many coworkers, taking public transit, with kids in daycare, etc. end up with a lot more inevitable inter-household exposure. And obviously people who are elderly, immune compromised, or with other health problems face (orders-of-magnitude) higher individual risk when infected.

But personal choices to avoid exposure make a huge difference to the reproductive rate of the virus.

And government responses providing free test capacity, mandating masks in indoor public spaces, restricting indoor dining, early in the pandemic closing gyms and schools, providing places for people to isolate away from their households, providing financial support for people unable to do their jobs safely, guaranteeing sick pay, etc., and recommendations discouraging unmasked indoor inter-household mingling make a huge difference.

SF has not been perfect by any means. Something like a third of the deaths throughout the pandemic were caused by spread resulting from the relaxation of the restriction on indoor dining for a couple months in the fall of 2020. Early on the city did a poor job getting test capacity where it was most needed in low-income neighborhoods. The city could do a better job providing and encouraging the use of high quality masks. The messaging on boosters hasn’t been forceful enough. And city guidance was too slow to react to changing scientific knowledge (e.g. a 6-foot rule makes limited difference; sanitizing surfaces is useless; masks need not be mandated outdoors except maybe in dense crowds). But overall response here has been faster and more competent than almost anywhere else in the USA.

The way to make the bay sustainable is to build taller buildings for people to live in. However this isn't especially popular and even if it was, there is enough bureaucratic cover for a minority to stall it off indefinitely.

I think if you could do that in the next 20 years the bay could maintain it's hegemony. Seems exceedingly unlikely to me.

I suspect it will keep enough momentum to beat out most markets for some time to come, though already by a smaller margin and with a seemingly worse quality of life these days.

Housing prices in Austin, Raleigh/Durham/Cary, Pittsburgh, Boulder, Bend are becoming unaffordable to folks who were there 10 years prior. And I wouldn't be surprised if existing residents are complaining about the influx of new transplants.

It's tough to predict housing demands and tougher to build infrastructure and houses fast enough for these population changes.

However to f0e4c2f7's point, I agree that unless the Bay Area mitigates its high rents, the region will stagnate. High CoL and creativity are inversely related.

This doesn’t seem to be the solution to the problem. People don’t want to “buy” and raise families in high rise condos. I live in Berkeley and we have a shit ton of new condo units coming on the market every month and I can’t believe they’re anywhere near capacity and every one has low-income housing units.

The greater Bay Area has a shit ton of available land that could fill a need for single family homes. Heck running Bart to Marin would bring a whole new world of commutable homes in range. Turn 92 into a 6-8 lane highway instead of 2 and the whole half moon bay side of San Mateo county comes in range. If the goal is affordable single family homes improving access to these areas from a commute perspective would do more.

Your feelings are not everyone's feelings, and not everyone wants the same things. I have two kids, and would love noooothing more in the word than being able to live some place where we could walk to our daily activities rather than piling into the damn car. That's only possible with high density and shared parks. That's exactly what I want.

But even if I'm only 5% of families, there's still tooooooons of non-families that would love those condos. Much better than 6 unrelated people splitting rooms in a four bedroom detached house, plus that frees up the detached house for those that really want it for their families. Look around at all those single family neighborhoods in the Bay Area with seemingly inadequate street parking. That's because there are soooo many adults splitting up those homes.

There's also all sorts of people that want to downsize as they age, and also get out of their cars to live their daily life.

This doesn't have to be you. But there are tons if peol who feel this way, and their preferred way of life has been literally banned by law. There's only a very very few tiny areas where it's allowed, and it's in such ridiculous demand that it's often more expensive than much more spacious housing.

There are hundreds of millions if not billions of people happily doing this. Including in the U.S., e.g. New York, San Francisco and Boston.

> improving access to these areas from a commute perspective would do more

You're describing massive public works to sustain a low-density lifestyle. Those populations couldn't pay for that infrastructure. So it's asking, once again, cities to subsidize suburbs.

Let me be clear - I'm responding to a post about "Skyscrapers" in the Bay Area, which is a poorly defined term but if you say its 10 stories how many residential buildings of more that 10 stories do you believe exist in SF? I've lived in the Bay Area my entire life and literally zero people who have raised a family in a "Skyscraper" or high rise. New York is the only city I'm aware of where this is a common occurrence but even in those communities raising a family in a High-Rise is a sign of wealth.

There are not hundreds of millions of people raising families in Skyscrapers and high rises, there's likely not even enough inventory in those types of buildings for that statement to event make sense.

If that were truly the case wouldn't a number of other states also be banning non-completes in hopes of attracting businesses? Some quick googling shows only the District of Columbia, North Dakota, and Oklahoma have similar bans on non-competes as California.

OTOH I sorta wonder if the investment in semiconductor fabs and sales orgs in say Arizona is partially founded in the lure of effective non-competes.

Y/Y: It looks like NY, SJ have recovered (at least for the single bedroom) while the Bay Area is lagging. Some winners are Miami, San Diego, and Orlando. It seems that Florida has seen the highest rise in rental costs. Some losers are Newark, Virginia, St Louis. It seems the shittier cities have lost the most, and the sunnier/friendlier ones have won. In that sense, San Francisco has done averagely.

Based on that, I don't think SF/Bay Area is going downhill as people are imagining. They are doing much better than other places especially that they are already very expensive.

I'm not bullish on the Bay Area. But top 50% engineer sitting next to a top 10% engineer will vastly outperform one alone in the middle of the country.

Many of the high-paying tech jobs in Los Angeles are consolidated in the Venice Beach area, so-called “Silicon Beach.” If you think you can get an affordable house in the desirable neighborhoods around there (Santa Monica, Manhattan Beach, Venice, Brentwood), you’re in for a shock.

You might try heading inland to Inglewood or Culver City to save money, but you’ll be looking at $1.5M houses with bars on the windows. Prices have just gone insane over the last couple years.

Plus, if you’re hoping to escape the crime and addicts of the Tenderloin and Market Street, Venice won’t offer much relief.

The hacker houses here are still rammed to the gills.

For example, getting software devs that are willing to work long hours to push out a new release. etc.

take this with a grain of salt as i've never been to the bay area.

That is a function of being single, young, and naive, not of location. Once you grow up, you realize that working long hours on someone else's dream while your family needs you is idiotic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

The SF Bay Area crossed over that boundary a fairly long time ago.

I finally gave up in 2016 after being born and raised in California and have decades of Tech career in the SF Bay Area. It's no longer viable for ACTUAL innovation there. For the most part there is no technology innovation happening in SF Bay Area Tech companies anymore. There is plenty of revolutionary political innovation but nothing in technology and the direction of that is distinct ANTI-innovative.

Innovation no longer requires being in the SF Bay Area to be achieved. My recent formation of a new Tech company (in 2016 in upstate NY) and sale/exit in 2018 proves it to me. YMMV of course.

Cost of living is high, but for a junior engineer I think it might be possible for a good case to be made that it is worth it assuming that the junior engineer has a fairly recent bachelor's degree from a good college.

One of the lessons you should have learned incidentally while getting your degree is that if your rent and utilities and much of your food are covered and you are busy enough that you don't have a ton of free time you can get by for at least 4 years without having much extra money.

The median household income in San Francisco is $112k per year. The average household size is 2.26 persons.

This means that half the households in San Francisco are getting by on less than $112k per year. That's for everything--rent/mortgage, food, utilities, insurance, transportation, clothes, entertainment.

I'd consider if I was a junior engineer taking the San Francisco job if it paid significantly more than $112k, and then for the next few years live like I lived in college. Live in the kind of housing that the people who are making under the median household income live in, and everything you make that doesn't go to living in that housing with a lifestyle similar to a college student put in in your 401k or other investments.

You already know from college that you can live this way for 4 years and come out OK. If you can just do that for a few more years, you can have some nice savings built up. Then you can figure out if you want to stay in San Francisco but upgrade your lifestyle, or move to someplace cheaper, but with a nice fat portfolio of savings and investments that will serve you very well later.

A data point - my company is already hiring more than half of the new hires outside the USA. Or to paraphrase a politician, that whirring sound you are hearing is one of the last remaining sources of good jobs getting sucked out of the country.

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696235 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784222

Once the pandemic is over, startups that are in-office will be more productive and faster than bigger companies. The bigger companies will notice this, and force in-person/in-office as well and remote will quickly devolve.

Remote is survivable, mainly because of the pandemic, but it’s not preferable for business. In-office is much more efficient and it will be immediately evident once it is enforced.

My experience goes mostly the other way, that remote workers are more efficient, but of course, two sets of experiences doesn't make a large data set.

> Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication. Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network.

Discussed on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494920

It's not a perfect study but we don't really have that much actual research and evidence either way.

I also wonder how we will quantify "remote work" between different disciplines. HR vs Sales vs Engineering vs creative work, etc.. I'd guess the effects are different on different disciplines.

Lol, aka less meetings/broadcast missives, and more actual conversations?

There are so many factors and variables at play that I'm not sure there will be a definitive "answer" whether remote is better or worse. I think it strongly depends on the team, the company the industry, etc.

My experience is that remote done well, where everyone is enthusiastic, etc, is even better than in-office.

But for some jobs/companies it seems the in-office bullying is an important part of "motivation".

Pandemic is not really going to be "over". The hope that it would just become endemic is fizzling out. We'll certainly continue living life, but it will never go back to the way it was.

My money is that Omicron will bring record deaths that we'll start seeing a few weeks. People will realize wishful thinking doesn't do much to fight pandemics. Most people will think Omicron will make them immune forever, and we'll get new variants periodically, sometimes they'll be short and mild sometimes they'll be awful. People will start realizing that it's waiting for an end that's exhausting, and getting on with life, even if that means things are never quite the same, is preferable.

"Back to office" will increasingly seem like a liability. Employees are already getting sick of the perpetually moving "back to office" dates. After 3 years of perpetually moving back these dates more and more companies will realize it's much healthier and more productive to just move forward as things are.

> In-office is much more efficient and it will be immediately evident once it is enforced.

People may hate remote work during the pandemic, but I have seen very few people find that their teams are any less productive and plenty that have found them more productive. I've worked for successful remote teams for years prior to pandemic. The only issue in the past that remote startups really had was that VCs didn't like the look of not having an office in SF.

I really hope you are wrong in this prediction.

> but I have seen very few people find that their teams are any less productive and plenty that have found them more productive

I've seen the same. You hear about isolated instances of teams being less productive but like you said, most folks I've talked to said their team has become more productive with remote work.

IMO remote work is here to stay and is the future and I think it all boils down to not having to be co-located with your co-workers. Once management and HR figure out that this lets them have a 10x larger talent pool, they will get onboard (if they haven't already)

For the record I also hope that I am wrong on this. I very much believe that we really don't know at this point (unfortunately rising hospitalization data, and uptick in deaths has me concerned).

The trouble is the media chanting of "it's mild!" has meant people have basically ignored Omicron when we didn't have enough information to say "it's fine!" being mild and highly contagious can easily mean more deaths, and we haven't had enough data to say where the balance lies.

Are people still trotting out the "just wait 2 more weeks!" shtick?

Anywhere I can go to make this bet with you? Willing to put down $100 that there aren't record deaths in the US in the next 3 weeks.

We've seen record hospitalization for the pandemic (which today looks like it may be peaking): https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admis...

The record daily death so far is 2,997 which surpasses all waves with the exception of last winter's which was the largest on record so far: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths

You still have a reasonably good chance of being correct but I think at the very least you should reconsider writing off the risks as "shtick". The number to beat for daily deaths is 4,069. Either way right now we have the 2nd worst wave of the pandemic as far as deaths go, which is very far from the "mild" claims that were aggressively circulating a few weeks ago.

I'll check back in two more weeks.

In aggregate we're only 2 years into the majority of companies giving full-remote serious consideration, so it hasn't really been fully tested yet. I don't think fully remote will be the default by any stretch, because at the end of the day many people are not cut out for remote work, but it's definitely going to be stickier than a lot type A management blowhards want to believe, and I predict we'll see some major all-remote success stories at scale over the next 5-10 years.

Occasional get-togethers do help with this quite a lot, but it's not necessary.

What I find strange about this reasoning is: doesn't every hacker have friends from around the world they've never met in person? From various software projects, open source contributions, online community connections etc I have a fairly long list of people who are very important to me that I've never met in person.

It happens for some but I can't say its the norm. Most people's meaningful relationships are based on real life, at least initially or some of the time.

Meeting people in person, at least once, is valuable. It improves communication, helps people feel assimilated to the company and team, and creates a mental image of a three-dimensional co-worker (instead of just a faceless Slack handle)

Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable. This is especially true for those who have significant commutes or families.

Unfortunately this doesn't really cut it. There is a huge difference between the teams I worked in where we were all remote vs the ones where all of us were in the office. The camaraderie, the amount of slack we gave each other, how fast we delivered and the overall mood was much better despite having wildly different personalities.

With remote, you are interfacing with only one dimension of someone's personality and they may rub you the wrong way in a PR comment or otherwise and you can easily right them off. It's different when you go for lunch with the same person and talk about work or other stuff.

Another thing is that talking about work-related-but-not-current-project-related stuff is much easier when people in the same location and the conversation starts off spontaneously. Whereas in a remote setting it needs to be a bit more organized so there is an overhead.

There are a lot of pros to remote though, like not having to be subjected to your colleague's poor hygiene.

Doesn't ring true to me after spending 2 years in a remote-first setup. Even post-vcxx setup where everyone could meet freely didn't facilitate as much in-person interaction as I was looking forward to.

> Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable.

For junior engineers trying to onboard, sitting close to their mentors is big help. Same for senior TLs who are coordinating complex technical projects across a team of 10-12 engineers or even more. Having everyone around is a big time saver for the overall project. WFH/Remote setup is great only for the engineers who are self-sufficient and neither need mentoring from others nor have to coordinate and lead other engineers' work.

You make a lot of questionable assertions. Why would meeting up a few times a year be as good as seeing someone every day?

Hybrid enables a move from San Francisco to e.g. Petaluma. It doesn't permit most workers to move to Idaho. That argues for an expansion of the Bay Area over its demise.

I get that teamwork will suffer etc. so the jury is out for me. That said if I ran a company it would be fully remote.

In Cali I would have to juggle with deferred stocks, exit taxes, local taxes, federal taxes etc.. And net salary would be about same.

Also, if you have heard crazy stories about American healthcare, rest assured that a tech job paying you 250K USD will also offer you very good insurance that you don't have to worry about it generally. I am an immigrant, did this exact calculation and am living a far better lifestyle than what I could ever afford in my home country.

I am not worried about healthcare. It is just ultra expensive if you want good quality.

As bad as the SF Bay Area is, it's not as bad as LA when it comes to salary-housing cost mismatch. So the average person who was born in LA is even worse off than the Bay Area. Tech is not the cause of California's housing problems.

Those local power brokers that own the land and profit off of housing scarcity are also setting the narrative. So by creating a tech boogie man, they can deflect any political energy away from any solution that might help the housing situation, from which they directly profit.

Do you think Detroit is celebrating the demise of its automakers for having reduced property values? Bay Area homeowners are lords who convinced their peasants that the merchants are eating their lunch.

The transmission mechanism between industry and home prices is employment. The people praying for an exodus of tech workers should also be prepared for the impact it would have on the public purse.

Assuming someone leaving the Bay Area will go elsewhere in California. And even if they move to e.g. Sacramento, why would their tax dollars continue going to the Bay? Their votes moved with them.

In my state, Illinois, we have the opposite problem. Our state income tax is a flat rate (4.95%). In order for politicians to raises taxes, they target property taxes. The result is one of the highest property tax rates in the country.

We should be fighting for higher wages everywhere, not limiting them because we gave away all our power to landlords.

When there’s a lack of supply then the top earners set the market. When top earners make more then prices are higher.

Even if there were zero in-migration, there still wouldn’t be enough housing for the rising generation.

The first is many companies will return to requiring a majority of time in the office. There are admittedly hard to measure reasons management will want back in the office, and the first is productivity (I don’t mean how much an IC produces, but how much revenue per employee a firm generates).

The second future is all our tech jobs get offshored, similar to what happened after the dotcom bubble burst.

I believe that companies will probably wind up going to future #1. Or at least companies that are heavily invested in R&D.

There will probably be more satellite offices and more geographically distributed tech startups.

But in the first future I believe SF and Silicon Valley will still serve as one of the largest tech employment hubs. For example NYC is still a major financial hub, despite major top-25 US banks being headquartered in places like Texas, Virginia and North Carolina.

Edited to comply with Dang’s reminder of site guidelines.

Please don't do this in HN comments. It adds noise, breaks the penultimate guideline (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and is uncorrelated with reality.

But the biggest factor preventing a mass transition to off-shoring is that off-shore devs are always contractors since very few orgs can handle the logistics of international employment. As someone that did contract work for 5 years, contractors do not engage the same way that employees do. We are generally immune from the client's political bullshit and if things get too messy we are much more likely to waltz to another contract rather than help fix your org's fundamental problems.

I had a really hard time being motivated for the mid-sized company, because it felt like there was very little impact to my work, and a lot of time was spent bikeshedding and yak shaving, the work I did do was not very interesting, I wasn't being challenged, and I wasn't learning new things. I was basically a glorified button-pushing monkey. In my last year working there I started tracking my time for my personal analysis, and found that I was doing ~15 hours per week of work (which included >5 hours of meetings, some of which were large conference calls which I would fall asleep during). I ended up quitting to take 6 months off work.

When I started contracting for a startup (working on interesting things), I found I have much more ownership over the tools I work on (I've sort of become 'in charge' of several applications that I'm the only developer on), and I'm billing per hour also. I still struggle to get more than 30 hours per week, but I've probably turn out more code in a month here than in the last year at the last place.

I definitely agree re: language and async headaches. I won't work with shops that route all comms through a PM anymore, that usually means that the devs don't speak much English and the code quality is going to suffer due to poor naming conventions and lack of quality tech documentation.

I think it will be the major choice for many companies for one simple reason, they've paid for the office. Either via rent or by building it.

An office also normally has a vibe, a community spirit, etc. That has disappeared with remote work. People complain they miss it yet still don't realise the only way it's coming back is if everyone has to go to the office.

I think the hybrid way will be popular for a year or two then companies will go back to demanding that people are in the office. Especially large corporations.

Part of the reason so many people wanted to go remote was that a lot of offices sucked (in addition to commutes, etc). It’s be great if we got better offices for those who wanted them and more flexible remote for others (but that’s probably too optimistic).

I think a few factors might moderate this outcome:

1) Timezone-spreads matter. The 4-hour span of West Coast to East Coast time zones isn't ideal, but manageable. Beyond that, realtime collaboration becomes a serious challenge.

2) Maybe (I hope) remote-work enablers like dedicated workspaces and interactive whiteboards will get more widely adopted.

These could make a "middle ground" between those to extremes more competitive.

I agree. There is some temporary leverage tech employees have right now, but as it fades, the inexorable pressure will be to return to the office a significant amount of the time. Middle managers at many companies exist primarily to build kingdoms, and they like to see their subjects.

I think we will see a permanent increase in remote work, but I don't think the level we see now will persist for more than a couple years.

Now a fully remote company is something else, that's probably hard to do. But hybrid together with a certain percentage of fully remote workers makes a lot of sense to me.

It's not great, but it's just a simple reality that plays out no matter how hard people try to work around it. This is why I won't work remotely for a company that does hybrid teams. I will only work on a team that is fully remote, or one that is local enough to me that I'm part of the in-office crowd.