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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

#361

Post by kube-system »

betaby wrote: post #323
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…

At the same time, GitLab services are NOT priced per region. Neither cost of the IPhone or Telsa is discounted in the region of FarmVille, Nowhere.

The price of products does often vary between regions when their is a regional explanation for the difference in price. iPhones and Teslas are priced differently in different locations, as are many many other products and services.

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

#362

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…

[deleted]

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

#363

Post by betaby »

kube-system wrote: post #361
betaby wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, GitLab services are NOT priced per region. Neither cost of the IPhone or Telsa is discounted in the region of FarmVille, Nowhere.

The price of products does often vary between regions when their is a regional explanation for the difference in price. iPhones and Teslas are priced differently in different locations, as are many many other products and services.

Iphones and Teslas indeed priced differently, most of the time they cost more in the places with lower purchasing power. I.e. compare cost of Iphone in Eastern Europe and US.

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

#364

Post by throwawaysea »

paxys wrote: post #265
throwawaysea wrote: post #232

It's not just about the rents and finances. Escaping Silicon Valley is also escaping a monoculture. Yes, the Bay has diversity in one sense (for example ethnic backgrounds), but in other ways (diversity of thought) it is very uniform. Urban living is also just one way of living. It's not the way everyone wants or needs to live, and those who want more breathing room can seek that out if they can work remotely. Politi…

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

Another way to look at it is that a web of many economically viable locations and ways of living produces a diversity of thought/perspectives in aggregate, whereas grouping everyone up in a few places leads to dominant and stale monocultures.

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

#365

Post by hintymad »

An honest question: isn't this what local governments want? I see cities and counties implement two policies: rent control, and blocking development of high-density residential areas. Both measurements will limit supplies (while benefiting incumbents), so naturally people would move away.

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

#366

Post by dgudkov »

aripickar wrote: post #8

I'm pretty bearish on the pandemic actually leading to massive change in the number of people permanently working from home. My boss put out a survey a week or two ago among my org (30 or so people), and 70% said that they want to work from the office, full time, 20% said some time or most of the time, and 10% said fully remote. And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home duri…

I'm afraid what workers want is not really important. The pandemics became a huge proof-of-concept for many C-levels execs. The vast majority of them were absolutely sure that if the employees start working from home their companies would fall apart immediately. To their big surprise, that actually didn't happen when quarantine and WFH was enforced by governments. Now they can't stop thinking of WFH as of a huge cost-cutting opportunity.

Nobody asked employees if they wanted open offices or not, it was simply enforced on them. The same will happen with WFH - it will be simply enforced, sometimes with a plausible, good-sounding justification.

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

#367

Post by asdff »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #346
asdff wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Were these people with "person" jobs or "thing" jobs? Person jobs are sales, marketing, maybe even business analyst, etc. Thing jobs are coders, DBAs, accountants, etc. I find it very easy to believe that people whose job primarily revolves around other people will have serious productivity issues remotely. It's harder to comprehend that jobs around code/numbers/widgets have the same problem. I'm not saying it's impo…

Things and person I guess? This is in research, but any research is about communicating ideas. People need other people to help with their research and strategize the next steps, and it's hard to properly explain your thoughts and engage people with your ideas if you aren't in the same room with zero body language and have to speak one person at a time, and are bogged down by having too many zoom meetings to make up for the lack of informal meetings to do any real deep work with the time left.

It's a two pronged effect that myself and colleagues are experiencing: the meetings themselves aren't very productive due to the lack of in person communication and need to be longer to share the same quantity of information and understanding, by having to coordinate meetings between multiple people they are perfectly interspersed such that you can't really get any deep work done until 5pm rolls around and you can start burning the midnight oil uninterrupted.

Plus there is the mental side. We are friends who work together as much as we are collegues, and losing that side of interactions is tough for everyone. If I we had been working remote full time I would have never made these friendships stemming from casual random conversations, which imo really improves productivity in the group more than anything else.

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

#368

Post by whatok »

asdff wrote: post #367
Consultant32452 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were these people with "person" jobs or "thing" jobs? Person jobs are sales, marketing, maybe even business analyst, etc. Thing jobs are coders, DBAs, accountants, etc. I find it very easy to believe that people whose job primarily revolves around other people will have serious productivity issues remotely. It's harder to comprehend that jobs around code/numbers/widgets have the same problem. I'm not saying it's impo…

Things and person I guess? This is in research, but any research is about communicating ideas. People need other people to help with their research and strategize the next steps, and it's hard to properly explain your thoughts and engage people with your ideas if you aren't in the same room with zero body language and have to speak one person at a time, and are bogged down by having too many zoom meetings to make up…

How much of your day was taken up by meetings before and is the same amount of time used for the equivalent meetings now? Do you have additional "status" meetings that were hastily put together just because?

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

#369

Post by kube-system »

tfehring wrote: post #358
kube-system wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think companies have ever done COL adjustments out of altruism. It's because of market effects.

If you pay Kansas rates for an employee in NYC, you're not going to get qualified candidates. This doesn't make a difference if the employee is driving to an office or not. Both remote and and onsite employees live somewhere. When you hire someone in NYC remotely, you're also competing with employers onsite in NYC, paying NYC rates. If there's anything that results from the shift to remote, it's going to be that companies hire fewer people in high COL locations.

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

#370

Post by taurath »

whatok wrote: post #266
taurath wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your company is in multiple offices you miss those anyway.

This is also somewhat of a self-correcting problem too. If these conversations really matter so much and either information isn't transmitted efficiently throughout the organization or it becomes a remote vs office clique thing, management either finds a solution or you probably go back to everyone in the office. What I do know is that a lot of businesses are functioning perfectly fine 100% remote right now and there…

And guess what, having meetings with a purpose agenda and notes both reduces meetings and makes them more useful.
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