Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 294 posts

Re: Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them

#61

Post by iaw »

davidw wrote: post #31

I can't read the article, but this appears to be hitting us hard here in Bend, Oregon. House prices were already high and only appear to be going higher. I think more people could be a great thing if we get them involved locally, and if we add enough housing to accommodate them, which is tricky right now. As someone involved with a local YIMBY group, it's tough to see the prices - it felt like we were making some pro…

In 1978 California passed the ill-conceived Proposition 13 which encourages people to keep houses rather than sell them through lower tax rates for longer ownership.

California has almost 40M residents and Oregon has a bit over 4M, even a fraction of those 40M going north to Oregon is going to overload the housing market there.

Re: Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them

#62

Post by reducesuffering »

umeshunni wrote: post #41
nendroid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course but bay is still one of the best in the world. Also the bay encompasses more than SF, while SF and daly city have notoriously foggy weather, the rest of the bay area is quite good.

There's a narrow slice between San Mateo and Santa Clara that has great weather. Anything North or West is cold and foggy. South Bay and East Bay pushes 100F for 3 months a year. And this is before you consider that we now have 1-2 months of smoke season.

South and East Bay only have ~10 days a year of 95+. You make it sound like Texas.

Re: Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them

#63

Post by spaceflunky »

iandanforth wrote: post #37
stanrivers wrote: post #3

Are companies going to start adjusting salaries for people who move (this makes zero sense to me, the value you add most likely doesn’t change because of where you live)? That’s where this gets weird... people move to these better-to-live places and then all the employers decides to pay them less because of location. Then you just push up housing prices with salaries that slowly reset over time to be cost of living a…

This is exactly correct. If you pay for a product you are not entitled to force a price reduction if the efficiencies of the producer improve. In most cases purchasers are not even entitled to know about production costs. It's just that with in person labor purchasers have gotten used to having access to this privileged information and abuse it. No, the real economic force at work for here is the halo effect. If you'…

>If you pay for a product you are not entitled to force a price reduction if the efficiencies of the producer improve.

No, you actually should be. If you work in manufacturing and you're any good at your job, you analyze what it actually cost to make a product. If for example, the price of a commodity heavily used in your product bottoms out from a previously very high price, you should make a call to your supplier demanding some kind of price adjustment (either future or retroactively).

SV paid high prices because the explosive growth and geographic constraints made housing prices very high, therefore salaries had to go up to entice people to come. Rising salaries were not based on competition for talent alone.

I get that a lot of companies are posturing that they wont localize pay, but eventually they'll wise up since their talent pool has grown very significantly. Salaries use to go because pool of applicants who were willing to move to SV was a lot smaller. Now that limitation has all but evaporated. These companies aren't stupid, they'll find cost savings just like those people moving to the boonies.

Re: Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them

#64

Post by geebee »

komali2 wrote: post #26
lotsofpulp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(this makes zero sense to me, the value you add most likely doesn’t change because of where you live)? Price is the intersection of supply and demand. A buyer will ask a seller to accept a lower price if they think the seller is willing to accept a lower price. A seller might accept a lower price if they don't think they can get a higher price. You are paid $X because the buyer couldn't find someone willing to accep…

> and you accepted $X because you couldn't find someone to give you $X+1. My buddy accepted $X -($X *.8) = $Y because the company offering $Y was doing something ethical. Point being there's far more variables at stake here to over simplify.

Did your buddy take an 80% salary cut? If that’s the case, I’d guess that he was either extremely well paid before, or he’s got huge savings and could afford to not to work anymore.

That said I work for below market because I value the work and enjoy it. Not sure what kind of bump I’d get but it wouldn’t be a 5x

Re: Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them

#66

Post by nendroid »

umeshunni wrote: post #41
nendroid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course but bay is still one of the best in the world. Also the bay encompasses more than SF, while SF and daly city have notoriously foggy weather, the rest of the bay area is quite good.

There's a narrow slice between San Mateo and Santa Clara that has great weather. Anything North or West is cold and foggy. South Bay and East Bay pushes 100F for 3 months a year. And this is before you consider that we now have 1-2 months of smoke season.

For the south bay it's not 3 months of the year, 100F lasts for like 2-3 weeks at most (actually realistically it's more like 95-100). It's the same for socal. Socal has about 2-3 weeks in the summer where the temps become sweltering.

Even within LA the temperatures vary, the closer you are to the coastline the better the weather.

I know because I grew up in the south bay, I lived in SF for 2 years and lived in LA for 10 years.

What's overall better in socal is that the winters are much more mild. In the south bay the worst you can get is ice in the morning and really cold nights. Socal winters just has a very slightly lower temperature than spring.

Not trying to say NorCal has better weather than Socal. I'm saying NorCal has some of the best weather in the world despite it not having the "perfect" weather that Socal has. The entire CA coast line is afterall still in the mediterranean climate zone.

Re: Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them

#67

Post by ghaff »

beamatronic wrote: post #58
reaperducer wrote: post #39

People have been talking about this on HN for a few months now, and I never took it seriously since these threads are always filled with people quoting numbers saying it's not happening. That was until last month, when two tech workers from San Francisco moved into the neighborhood. Both have the same story: Their company went work-from-home when the pandemic started, then made it permanent, so the company employees…

So...uh... whereabouts is that exactly? Asking for a friend.

I'm guessing from his twitter somewhere within range of Las Vegas.

Re: Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them

#68

Post by lotsofpulp »

spaceflunky wrote: post #63
iandanforth wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly correct. If you pay for a product you are not entitled to force a price reduction if the efficiencies of the producer improve. In most cases purchasers are not even entitled to know about production costs. It's just that with in person labor purchasers have gotten used to having access to this privileged information and abuse it. No, the real economic force at work for here is the halo effect. If you'…

>If you pay for a product you are not entitled to force a price reduction if the efficiencies of the producer improve. No, you actually should be. If you work in manufacturing and you're any good at your job, you analyze what it actually cost to make a product. If for example, the price of a commodity heavily used in your product bottoms out from a previously very high price, you should make a call to your supplier d…

>If for example, the price of a commodity heavily used in your product bottoms out from a previously very high price, you should make a call to your supplier demanding some kind of price adjustment (either future or retroactively).

You can only do this if you have an alternative, such as another supplier willing to provide you the product at a lower price. But my COGS going down has only partial bearing on what my customer pays me. I charge my customers the maximum I can get them to pay me, and my suppliers do the same to me.

>SV paid high prices because the explosive growth and geographic constraints made housing prices very high, therefore salaries had to go up to entice people to come. Rising salaries were not based on competition for talent alone.

SV paid high prices because they wanted to hire people in a specific geographic area, thereby lowering the supply of labor they had to choose from. If SV expands their supply of labor, and SV thinks it can get the same output from different supplier willing to accept less, then they will choose to do that.

Re: Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them

#69

Post by subpixel »

davidw wrote: post #31

I can't read the article, but this appears to be hitting us hard here in Bend, Oregon. House prices were already high and only appear to be going higher. I think more people could be a great thing if we get them involved locally, and if we add enough housing to accommodate them, which is tricky right now. As someone involved with a local YIMBY group, it's tough to see the prices - it felt like we were making some pro…

I'm in a part of New England I won't name where this is also happening. Here, it's a convergence of families from both coasts who are now supported by remote work and various wealthy families able to simply buy up real estate that suddenly looks rather underpriced compared to the Bay Area or NYC/Boston. (I say families b/c this rural area is not much of a draw for singles.)

In September I called an agent the day a property hit Zillow and made an appt to look at 1pm the next day. At 10am the property had 7 offers.

Re: Tech Workers Take to the Mountains, Bringing Silicon Valley with Them

#70

Post by nendroid »

scubbo wrote: post #23
nendroid wrote: post #2

I think the migration out of the bay will make it a more reasonable place to live. We do have some of the best weather in the world. I'm going to gamble on staying. Hopefully this isn't like detroit.

> We do have some of the best weather in the world. Certainly some of the sunniest in the English-speaking world. Personally (as an ex-Londoner), I overheat a lot and actually miss a good rainstorm from time-to-time - but your evaluation does line up with most people's, I think. Let's just gloss over the increasingly-common smoke from wildfires... :)

>Let's just gloss over the increasingly-common smoke from wildfires... :)

Yeah that part is bad. Not sure how to rate CA in general when you account for this as the wild fires only started getting crazy recently. For most of my life overall the fires weren't a problem.

>Certainly some of the sunniest in the English-speaking world. Personally (as an ex-Londoner), I overheat a lot and actually miss a good rainstorm from time-to-time - but your evaluation does line up with most people's, I think.

Scientifically it is actually rated as some of the best in terms of closest to something like room temperature throughout the year. It's a climate zone called the mediterranean climate zone. It exists in a few places in the world.

Post reply on HN