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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

#81

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

dang wrote: post #79
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.

> bumfuck SC Please don't drop slurs into HN comments. Your comment would be fine without that bit.

I could give you the name of the town I grew up in but it's not going to mean anything to a non-native resident. If you've got a better turn of phrase for a low population town not particularly near anything, nor containing anything noteworthy I'd love to hear it.

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

#82

Post by xiaoma »

Xylakant wrote: post #64
theunixbeard wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pension payments??? What European business or country would pay pension to an American employee just for having worked there for a few years?

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

#83

Post by dang »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #81
dang wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bumfuck SC Please don't drop slurs into HN comments. Your comment would be fine without that bit.

I could give you the name of the town I grew up in but it's not going to mean anything to a non-native resident. If you've got a better turn of phrase for a low population town not particularly near anything, nor containing anything noteworthy I'd love to hear it.

You could have said "remote SC" or just "SC". I realize it's less colorful, but experience teaches that this is a price we must pay to have civil discussion online.

Had we been speaking in person it would likely have been obvious that you didn't mean it as a slur. But the bandwidth of online communication is so much lower that there's no capacity for such error correction even in one-to-one cases, let alone when hundreds of people are reading what you write.

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

#84

Post by liveoneggs »

akavi wrote: post #32
liveoneggs wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when did SV become a "city" comparable, in any way besides housing prices, to nyc?

I suspect people like LordCarbonFiber (and myself) mean SF. Which technically isn't "SV", per se, but since the discussion is about cost of living, the same argument applies. I, at least, agree with you when it comes to SV proper. At this point in my life, I wouldn't take any amount of money to live in rural South Carolina OR San Jose.

I think the better question is: would you live in Charleston or Atlanta or another less expensive city.

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

#86

Post by raverbashing »

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?

Define "much lower". Also Western Europe has several different countries.

In terms of "take home per month", expect between 2.5kE and 3.5kE for places like Ireland/Germany/Netherlands (YMMV) for a higher seniority

Now in Spain, Portugal, Italy it is going to be lower

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

#87

Post by 3s933x7dpsh »

Amygaz wrote: post #51
ghaff wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listen to podcasts and don't actually commute in that often anyway. To the degree that public transportation = subways/busses, I don't find it all that different as it's not that conducive to reading anyway in my experience.

I concur. My daily trip starts with the not so reliable and overcrowded commuter rail, with its spotty connection, so reading it is, (with my earbuds on, no music, because this thing is so noisy). I don't deal with the subway/bus frequently but it is only good for podcast time, and often I prefer walking, because it takes about the same time as the bus, and has more benefits.

> (with my earbuds on, no music, because this thing is so noisy)

Have you tried a pair of closed-back headphones?

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

#88

Post by Maultasche »

xiaoma wrote: post #82
Xylakant wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pension payments??? What European business or country would pay pension to an American employee just for having worked there for a few years?

The Netherlands will pay a pension to anyone who lives there past the age of 16. You'll get more money for every year you live there. One year of living there will get you something like 18 euros a month when you retire, but it's definitely more than zero. It's giving back to someone who has lived there and (presumably) has contributed by paying taxes. Someone who as lived there all their life only gets something like 800 euro a month, so I think that it's expected that you will have other savings or an employer-provided pension in addition.

I've never lived in the Netherlands, but I hear that employers there will also contribute towards a pension for an employee. This pension will be managed by some sort of private company. I'm not sure if it's a defined contribution or defined benefits pension. The details on when you get your pension and how much you get probably depend on the company that is managing it. It may be that a couple years of working will get you a very small pension or it may be that there's a minimum qualifying period. In any case, you should be able to get some benefit from it, even if it's a one-time lump sum payment.

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

#89

Post by JamesBarney »

whack wrote: post #67
mhotchen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

My understanding though is that if you're restricting yourself to top developers in India you should expect to be paying 40-80k(and rising) assuming you directly hired them. And this doesn't include setting up all of the infrastructure to hire overseas, not to mention the increased risk of operating out of two legal jurisdictions, timezone differences, and culture gaps.

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

#90

Post by nitrogen »

amyjess wrote: post #62
vmarsy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The response lag can be ameliorated to an extent by having lots of work going on in parallel so nobody is blocked on one critical reply from someone in another timezone.

I've done remote development as an employee, remote development as a consultant as sole developer on a project, and local development as an employee working with other remote developers. IMO a lot of the issues people have come from inexperience with asynchronous communication.

I would argue that growing up writing open source with international teams, using IRC and email lists, not only has made me appreciate remote work better, but also gave me a mindset to understand asynchronous distributed systems better, too. But it's not an insurmountable advantage; I believe any team, if it cares enough, can work effectively with remote developers, and get the morale and cost benefits of doing so.

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