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The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

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Re: The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

#61

Post by king_magic »

zappo2938 wrote: post #31
ghaff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it partly depends on how broadly you define "tech hub." If that includes 20-30 places worldwide, I'm not going to violently disagree. If it means Bay Area + Portland + Seattle + ...? Then I will. Especially because "tech" isn't limited to web/social/mobile.

If you want to work on a yacht, you have to move to Fort Lauderdale until you are established. There is no way around it. You can be a doctor anywhere, but if you are going to do medical research you have to be in New Orleans, New York Boston, DC / Maryland, or Chicago, maybe the Cleveland Clinic. If you are Marine Biologist you are living in Woods Hole, Monterey, or La Jolla. If you are doing aerospace engineering y…

> If someone wants to be a serious software engineer they are going to have to commit to living in SF, DC, Boston, Austin, or Portland at some point in the beginning.

Wow, what a shockingly inaccurate and unbelievably close-minded worldview. I got my start in a small city in Upstate NY, quite far from any major tech hubs, as a software engineer in the medical imaging world - happily spent several years there before I even considered moving to a larger city.

Guess I need to go back in time and tell my previous self that I wasn't a "serious software engineer", eh? Or is writing software that can potentially kill someone with radiation not serious enough for you?

Re: The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

#62

Post by amyjess »

vmarsy wrote: post #58
ryandrake wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, if your job can be done from home or from Arkansas, it can be done from India.

Working from the West coast regularly with people in India, Europe,and US east coast, I disagree. You certainly have some benefits of having teams spread out around the world, as you could virtually have someone working at any hour of the day. But communication is very hard with the foreign countries, because of 2 things: time difference, and some language barriers. Even with only the 3h time difference, communicatio…

> It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US.

Or for that matter, if your QA is in India and your devs in the US need more information to investigate, that can take days...

I worked at a company like that. I'd come into the office in the morning to see a ticket from a QA person in India, they didn't provide the information I needed to reproduce/investigate the bug, so I left a comment asking for it. Of course, they didn't get back to me until the middle of the night (my time), so I couldn't act on it until the next morning. And then, of course, I'd fix it, and they couldn't verify until the next night...

Re: The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

#63

Post by whack »

jeffbush wrote: post #46
ryandrake wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, if your job can be done from home or from Arkansas, it can be done from India.

I'd note that tech pundits and journalists have been saying for 20 years that many US jobs would move to India and other countries, but offshoring, while common, hasn't really made a dent in the US tech sector. It's interesting to think about why.

I think offshoring hasn't hurt the American tech scene, for precisely the same reasons that "working in SV and living in Arkansas" is so rare. Physical proximity matters. Being able to talk and hang out with your co-workers, face-to-face, in real-time, matters. This is why top SW companies like Google, despite hiring developers around the world, still focus on having teams that are working together in the same physical office, as opposed to geographically disparate teams.

Re: The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

#64

Post by Xylakant »

theunixbeard wrote: post #59
jeffbush wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd note that tech pundits and journalists have been saying for 20 years that many US jobs would move to India and other countries, but offshoring, while common, hasn't really made a dent in the US tech sector. It's interesting to think about why.

I've always wondered why tech salaries in Western Europe were so much lower than the US (exc. Silicon Valley effect). Could it be the proximity to similiar-culture Eastern Europe where inexpensive developers are easily available?

Salaries in the US and Europe cannot easily be compared by the numbers alone. There are factors such as minimum PTO, health insurance, paid sick leave, pension payments, etc. that skew the bare numbers. You'll have to find an US job that has similar benefits as the european job to even be on a somewhat level ground.

Re: The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

#65

Post by sanj »

ryandrake wrote: post #33
whack wrote: post #26

Be careful what you wish for. In a world where physical proximity no longer matters, American programmers earning 6 figures, will have to compete against programmers from South America/Europe/Asia, all of whom earn significantly less than 6 figures. There currently exists a massive salary gap between equally qualified programmers, living in different regions of the world. Eliminating the physical-proximity perks, wil…

In other words, if your job can be done from home or from Arkansas, it can be done from India.

Contracts written by a US company can be enforced far more easily in Arkansas than in India.

Re: The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

#66

Post by amyjess »

Spooky23 wrote: post #27
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the difference is you're stuck living in a "nice middle class neighborhood" with a ton of space you probably don't need. For many people moving to cities the value of the area is worth many times the value of the space. I wouldn't trade my nyc studio for a McMansion back in bumfuck SC no matter how much you offered me; and I think there must be a large population that shares that sentiment.

I haven't spent lots of time in SV, but it pretty much felt like a newer, nicer northern NJ with great weather to when I've visited. Big sea of strip malls and suburbia.

Eh, I think that's more SoCal (LA/SD) than NorCal (SV). SoCal feels like a giant sprawling suburb with great weather, and NorCal is just cold, expensive, and full of hipsters.

Like, there's a very large chance I'll end up moving to SoCal if I'm ever forced to leave Texas (which might actually happen next year), but I have no desire to live in NorCal even if you paid me seven figures.

Re: The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

#67

Post by whack »

mhotchen wrote: post #52
jeffbush wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd note that tech pundits and journalists have been saying for 20 years that many US jobs would move to India and other countries, but offshoring, while common, hasn't really made a dent in the US tech sector. It's interesting to think about why.

I set up an offshore team of four in India some years back. Two of the developers ended up being lackluster and let go, but two of them continued on as they were fairly decent. Even so the cultural difference was significant and it was difficult to manage them. I don't think it was their fault, they just had a very different views on what they considered was a completed task, how they went about asking for further re…

I'm guessing that none of the workers you're referring to are IIT graduates. I agree that American developers face little competition from the middle/lower end of developers in India. But the top developers in India (eg, the IIT grads and Google-India devs), in terms of raw talent and job performance, would easily out-compete the average American developer, while still being happy with a lower salary. This is where the physical-proximity-perks that American developers currently enjoy, really make a big difference.

Re: The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

#68

Post by amyjess »

zappo2938 wrote: post #31
ghaff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it partly depends on how broadly you define "tech hub." If that includes 20-30 places worldwide, I'm not going to violently disagree. If it means Bay Area + Portland + Seattle + ...? Then I will. Especially because "tech" isn't limited to web/social/mobile.

If you want to work on a yacht, you have to move to Fort Lauderdale until you are established. There is no way around it. You can be a doctor anywhere, but if you are going to do medical research you have to be in New Orleans, New York Boston, DC / Maryland, or Chicago, maybe the Cleveland Clinic. If you are Marine Biologist you are living in Woods Hole, Monterey, or La Jolla. If you are doing aerospace engineering y…

> If someone wants to be a serious software engineer they are going to have to commit to living in SF, DC, Boston, Austin, or Portland at some point in the beginning.

Well, given that I've never lived outside of Dallas and my career is well established, your claim is patently false.

> someone who wants to do 'web/social/mobile'

That is an awfully narrow definition of software engineering. I've never worked with web, social, or mobile, and I have quite a bit of experience as a software engineer under my belt. I've done platform software work for a telecom, platform software work for a robotics company, and NLP programming for a defense contractor in the past, and I currently work on network monitoring software for another telecom.

Re: The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

#69

Post by orware »

jphillipsio wrote: post #48

I live in Michigan and work for a company in SV. I love it in general but feel like it's pretty unlikely that I'd be able to find similar situation if I were to lose my job. It's not the best position to be in.

Exactly this.

I live in Southern California, but not in San Diego or LA where the prevalence of some sort of other tech work might be somewhat possible. Instead I live in Imperial County (bottom right of California).

Here, all of the decent paying IT work is in the County, State, Federal jobs available in the area, but this doesn't really represent Programming/Development work very well since those are even fewer amongst these organizations.

There are no real private software companies and while I'd like to start something on my own and go full time down the road, there's still tons of gaps in how that would look, and potential financial risk.

So where I'm at right now locally is really the best place I could be in.

But...I worked at eBay in San Jose for a time and I had two coworkers, one who aws a UX guy who worked out of Austin and came into the office about once a month in San Jose, and the other was a developer who didn't want to leave Australia so they flew him in every now and again too.

I really wished at the time that they could offer something similar to me, allowing me to stay down here in Imperial County (mainly to be close to family) but still get to come up to the Bay Area and work in the office every now and again (a nice mix of both worlds).

On the one hand, I haven't gotten any job offers from any companies lately, but additionally I would have the same concern as jphillipsio...if for whatever reason the company that hired me and allowed me to work remotely decided to let me go...how easy would it be to get another remote job with another SV company? If that didn't pan out, what would be the likelihood of me getting anything remotely similar locally?

Lot of things people have to worry about in these situations. Stability isn't always important...but it definitely becomes a big factor once you have a family or other responsibilities you can't just easily stop providing for.

Re: The Case for Working in Silicon Valley and Living in the Rust Belt

#70

Post by willholloway »

whack wrote: post #26

Be careful what you wish for. In a world where physical proximity no longer matters, American programmers earning 6 figures, will have to compete against programmers from South America/Europe/Asia, all of whom earn significantly less than 6 figures. There currently exists a massive salary gap between equally qualified programmers, living in different regions of the world. Eliminating the physical-proximity perks, wil…

There also currently exists a massive standard of living gap between different regions of the world.

Further development and economic growth will also create a leveling effect.

The future standard of living and costs in China and India looks a lot like the present in the United States.

As economies grow, and regulations increase (another way of saying externalities start getting priced in) the wage gap will diminish.

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