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Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

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Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#351

Post by talmr »

balfirevic wrote: post #332
talmr wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair - I used to live in Ohio and my parents and I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment that cost $600/mo about fifteen years ago. You could buy a 5 bedroom house for $250k. The school district I attended was also top notch. It was a great family area and I remember the mall, rec center, and numerous parks. I checked zillow recently and 5 bedroom homes are ~$300k and apartments are about $800/mo. At the time, my dad…

If you were able to afford a $250k house on $40k/year salary, why can't you afford a $1 million house on a "comfortable six figure salary" (if, presumably, that means at least $160k/year)?

Because everything else is also more expensive in California.

Way higher taxes. Gas costs double. My car registration fees for two cars was over a thousand dollars. The houses you can get for a million dollars have 3 small bedrooms, dated interiors, and pathetic back yards. If you want to live in an area that's safe and has good schools, you really need to pay a huge premium. A friend of mine purchased a 3 bedroom house that's really nice, and his down payment was almost as much as a house in Ohio. I do love living here, but it isn't really a fair comparison when it comes to housing. The houses I am mentioning in Ohio have acre plots, and large rooms.

If someone was to make less money in Ohio than their counterpart in California, I would say their dollar would stretch more in housing. Right now, even though I make decent money, I still live with house mates. I park my cars on the street, and I've had to deal with numerous crimes (bikes stolen, car registration stickers stolen, someone stole my bike rack, etc.)

FWIW I'm not the kind of person to trash California. I think there are still a lot of merits to living here.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#352

Post by asdff »

Apocryphon wrote: post #268
paxys wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think you're escaping "monoculture" by moving to Ohio?

It would at least be a different monoculture. And depending on the city, even less of one as East Coasters are fleeing their own respective sky-high rents to Ohio: https://nypost.com/2018/04/25/ex-new-yorkers-are-flocking-to...

I think people are imagining this will be pretty plug and play, but there will be a shock for sure if your standards of living and expectations come from larger and more diverse metros. I grew up in Cleveland, and lived in those listed areas in Columbus. They feel small, like very small. The 'active' walkable part of Columbus is like 2 miles on high street, where home prices are the highest and continually higher with every year. North of this is Ohio State, which I love but it's a weird place to hang out if you are over 25 and a football game isn't going on. South of these two miles on high street are downtown, which is empty after 5pm because it's all state government buildings and offices, and the german village which is admittedly quaint but not worth uprooting your life for imo, every city has a cute older area with $5 lattes. The rest of the city is suburbs stretching out until it blurs with farmland, indistinguishable from any of the other suburbs. Most of them don't even bother building sidewalks they are so dependent on the car. Public transit in Columbus is crap, basically a pity gesture from the city saying 'yes, we do have buses' and that's about it.

Cleveland is an overall nicer city than Columbus. It has older bones and is pretty well laid out on the east side with a few RTA rail lines. There are a lot of older neighborhoods that date to when Rockefeller lived here and made his fortune with Standard Oil along the riverbanks. You can get a mansion for ~$75k a bathroom right on the RTA line in Shaker Heights. The metropark system is also enormous.

However, Cleveland never recovered from white flight. The population of the greater metro area has been stagnant for 50 years, while the city proper has lost half its population in that time. Despite the good bones, Cleveland feels hollowed out as a result, and there is a lot of space now devoted to surface parking lots that used to be an apartment building in a formerly lively neighborhood. Still, there are a lot more walkable neighborhoods than Columbus and more options for living, but the city isn't growing nearly as fast as other metro areas and will not shore up the damage done to city life from white flight in my lifetime imo. I'd say about half the people from my high school class still live in Ohio, the rest took better positions elsewhere.

Coupled with the limited number of employers and therefore lack of jobs, and the six months of depression (sometimes it would only snow once or twice, the rest of winter everything will be grey and brown and muddy and dead, and 'scenic' autumn only lasts for like two weeks anyway), and I haven't looked back since moving west. In terms of my career, physical health now that I can be more active outdoors all year, and my mental health (Cleveland in particular only gets 80 days of sunshine a year), this was the greatest decision of my life. Plus I can actually get proper ethnic food, you should see what they call a taco in Cleveland. If I want to visit, can't beat a 5hr direct flight.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#353

Post by talmr »

balfirevic wrote: post #332
talmr wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair - I used to live in Ohio and my parents and I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment that cost $600/mo about fifteen years ago. You could buy a 5 bedroom house for $250k. The school district I attended was also top notch. It was a great family area and I remember the mall, rec center, and numerous parks. I checked zillow recently and 5 bedroom homes are ~$300k and apartments are about $800/mo. At the time, my dad…

If you were able to afford a $250k house on $40k/year salary, why can't you afford a $1 million house on a "comfortable six figure salary" (if, presumably, that means at least $160k/year)?

Also my parents couldn't afford a house there, and still don't have their own home. We were immigrants here, and our experience in Ohio was honestly a really good one with a supportive community.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#354

Post by downerending »

daenz wrote: post #79
subsubzero wrote: post #18

One thing this doesn't mention is the pay cuts that happen if you do decide to relocate to cheaper areas. Both me and my Wife's company have pay bands based on geographical region(most employees know nothing about this and most companies employ these salary COL changes for relocation) and certain regions you can take a big pay cut. Say your salary in the bay area is 100k for example, move to the South, say Florida an…

What's the rationale for this?

Theoretically, if they pay market, they can get someone to take the position. If you want over the market rate, there's a fair chance that someone with similar skills will under-bid you.

Other factors are at play than pure rational economics, though, so that might or might not work out.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#355

Post by thehappypm »

asdff wrote: post #335
thehappypm wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company hires a lot of Croatian software engineers. Most of them speak great English. 1/3 are very, very good, 1/3 OK, 1/3 literally terrible. But we rotate the bad ones out and keep the good ones, and the rumor is they cost about 1/3 or 1/2 of an American worker. I honestly feel that the American software engineer may be in trouble if remote really does take off -- 2 solid Croatian guys for the price of 1 tech br…

I expect to see a lot of companies doing this. You read the same exact docs whether you live in SF or Bulgaria. If anything you have better math skills outside the U.S. which helps you more than a language barrier would matter. Some might argue the best engineering is here, maybe that's correct maybe not, but companies rarely want the best. They just want the cheapest possible tool for the job they think they have. I…

It's worth mentioning that none of our tech leads are outsourced. All of the very demanding architecture work and decision making happens here. A lot of that yields a spec that needs a hundred hours of dev time -- for example, "update the iOS and Android apps to match the redesign we did on Mobile Web". You don't need a US based engineer for that type of work, but you sure as hell want the best possible guy designing the architecture and doing code review.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#356

Post by rcpt »

vdnkh wrote: post #313

I feel like most of HN is missing something here, of no fault of their own because they're not in my demographic (20-something yuppie). Young people want to live in cities. They're fun, exciting, and enable a robust social life. Moving to rural Ohio or Michigan, or even a "lesser" metro in the midwest is not the same as living in SF or NYC in terms of social opportunity. I work remote and I live in Brooklyn and I thi…

Yes but is SF really worth what you pay for it?

Also most of silicon valley is a boring suburb no different than what you can find anywhere in Texas or Florida.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#357

Post by novok »

asdff wrote: post #294
Consultant32452 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to keep in mind is that this is NOT what working remotely is really like. During normal times if I am missing socialization at work I can make up for it by going out more during the week. During normal times if I want I can spend a few hours working from the local cafe. But the cafes are closed. During normal times, kids are at school for most of the day so they don't disrupt you. But schools are closed. I'…

It doesn't matter if I have my laptop and a hotspot at the beach with tacos and a bucket of beers. It's an issue with a lack of effective communication on emails/slack/zoom compared with meeting with your colleagues face to face. Productivity has fallen off a cliff among everyone I've asked, and this is the reason.

Zoom, despite being better than the past software, still is fairly bad compared to talking face to face. Low bit rate video, walkie-talkie style communication due to noise cancellation, even when you all have headphones on and other issues just make it frustrating and lower quality.

Also for tight knit teams, the lack of a daily lunch with your coworkers is something else you miss.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#358

Post by tfehring »

kube-system wrote: post #288
tfehring wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For reference, GitLab are fully remote and publish their rationale [0] for paying regionally-adjusted salaries. Some of the arguments I don't really buy (for example, I don't think you need to hire anyone from very high cost of living areas to build a world-class engineering org at GitLab's scale) and others (e.g., the golden handcuffs argument) I think are just a consequence of fully remote teams currently being rar…

This isn't anything unique to remote companies. This has been standard practice for a very long time at companies with a presence in multiple locations, for the same reasons.

True, but I'm not sure that's equivalent. A company that employs onsite employees in a high cost of living area is demanding that they pay higher rent as a condition of employment and should bear the associated cost. It may still make sense for the company to bear that cost even if it's solely the employee's choice to live in a high cost of living area (e.g., for the reasons GitLab mention), but it's much fuzzier for remote employees than for onsite employees.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#359

Post by PenguinCoder »

subsubzero wrote: post #18

One thing this doesn't mention is the pay cuts that happen if you do decide to relocate to cheaper areas. Both me and my Wife's company have pay bands based on geographical region(most employees know nothing about this and most companies employ these salary COL changes for relocation) and certain regions you can take a big pay cut. Say your salary in the bay area is 100k for example, move to the South, say Florida an…

Yeah, agreed. I don't appreciate this type of race to the bottom. I live in a Low cost of living area, but my work output is not dependent on geographical location. If I do less or worse work than someone on my team in a HCOL area, I would be up for a PIP or worse. I would be absolutely fine with getting paid less, if my company had an expectation of lesser output. But, as it stand, I am expected to deliver as well or better than my peers (stacked ranking). In this case, I do not agree with the lower salary with the same output requirements.

If a company wants to pay less for the role, they shouldn't expect the same output. Geographic region is independent of the work required to be completed.

Re: Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents

#360

Post by [deleted] »

bialpio wrote: post #325
toomuchtodo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should you live near your job if it's expensive? Your choice. Should your employer pay you more if they can pay someone less who lives somewhere cheaper? Their choice. If you want to live in a small place in the city, there is a cost. If it's not pleasant to work from there because there isn't enough space, that is part of the cost. You are competing with folks who can now work from home, and have the space to do so…

> You are competing with folks who can now work from home, and have the space to do so effectively. Is that good or bad? No, it just is. Also, out of curiosity, how far would you be willing to take this sentiment? I'm originally from Poland - if I could live there and still earn my current US salary, I'd probably be able to buy one apartment every year and still have money left over to live comfortably. So, should yo…

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