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

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

#71

Post by notJim »

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…

Anecdotally, I'm aware of two companies that do change salaries based on location. One large-ish publicly traded company, and one late-stage startup.

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

#72

Post by bighitbiker3 »

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…

Salary isn't all about "the value you add" and at the end of the day it's supply and demand.

However, regardless of if the worker is taking a lower salary they should be maximizing purchasing power in whatever location they're working. If you can move somewhere rural, have a better quality of life, and have a higher savings rate while taking a pay cut you're still better off than your counterparts in [HCOL area] making double your salary.

Your salary only matters when compared to your peers in similar living situations.

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

#73

Post by didibus »

d1zzy wrote: post #48
SilasX wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's correct. But the question being asked is why the location changes the $X's there. I don't know that restatement of economic generalities helps unless you're going to apply them to the dynamic being asked about.

That seems obvious to me: lowering your cost of living means you are willing to accept $X-1, or if you personally don't want to another person that also moved out of high priced living area may accept a lower salary (so they get your job). Otherwise why did companies even have different compensation tiers for same type of work across US regions? Just because it takes some time for the market to price the changes it d…

True, also there is now a bigger talent pool to choose from, since you don't need to worry about finding candidates willing to relocate, that means more employees to choose from.

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

#74

Post by mdorazio »

ngokevin wrote: post #33
andreilys wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Diego and LA have SFBA easily beat in terms of weather.

Unless you don't like summer heat and heat waves. SF is more consistently around 70F. Depends if you like 55F - 75F versus 70F - 90F

We're talking about the same SF from this summer where the heat waves were just as bad as SoCal? California climate change now means you're going to get heat waves pretty much everywhere.

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

#75

Post by notJim »

gmadsen wrote: post #13
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…

I don't think it is 1-1 perfectly like that. In silicon Valley, a person with x skills is worth y dollars. If going remote, there will still be people with hard to find skills, probably because all the people with those skills were already in silicon valley. I don't see these jobs getting salary decreases. however, standard crud jobs that most programmers can do, yeah that will go down as rural employees are willing…

At least at places I've worked, there isn't really that distinction though. There's not one of type of engineer that does "standard crud jobs" (whatever that would mean) and another type that designs/scales systems or whatever. Instead, companies seem to prefer to hire generalists who can (theoretically) do either job, even if that means salaries might theoretically be higher. In other words, candidates for engineering positions all go through the same hiring pipeline, with small variations for front-end vs back-end, etc. I think as engineers, we should prefer this, because it gives us greater flexibility in our careers and greater room for growth.

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

#76

Post by throwaway0a5e »

silicon2401 wrote: post #49
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…

That's what makes it appealing to a lot of people who have been living around millions of other people. Soon many of these places will no longer be cheap and far away from other people. It'll be interesting to see how today's cultural conflicts play out when the more left-leaning, urban remote workers move en masse to smaller, more right-leaning, less urban places.

It's not about left right. It's about rural vs urban and have money vs not. Everything that's terrible and soul crushing about a tourism economy is about to happen to random places that have thus far been spared that fate.

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

#77

Post by redblacktree »

minhazm wrote: post #44
Droobfest wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the question becomes if Sillicon Valley will now also try to hire remotely from a larger talent pool all across the U.S. (or even world).

Silicon Valley, at least the bigger companies, already do that. Most people are not native to the area. Almost everyone I know in the bay area moved there for work.

Yes, but the set of people who are available to work remotely is much bigger than the set of people willing to relocate.

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

#78

Post by pengaru »

andreilys wrote: post #14
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.

San Diego and LA have SFBA easily beat in terms of weather.

I'm inclined to agree, if you can be near enough to the ocean to tame the summer heat.

SFBA winters are kinda miserable IMHO. It's not rust belt snow bad, but consistently cold and wet for months isn't exactly ideal.

And SF-proper regularly being fogged in renders too many nights useless WRT enjoying the outdoors, year-round. It's almost pointless to have something like a rooftop deck or outdoor patio. It'll all corrode and rot before you get sufficient use of it.

San Mateo manages to escape most of the negative fog effects though, I enjoyed living on the hill by 92 and Hillsdale Blvd. We'd regularly watch the apocalyptic fog stall @ Skyline while enjoying dinner outside on our deck.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

sna1l wrote: post #46

I think the burst of tech workers moving out of Silicon Valley/SF into surrounding suburbs + other areas is driven mostly by people who were already on the cusp of leaving the city. I've been thinking about leaving SF to move to the East Bay for the last couple years, and COVID-19 has provided a very strong impetus to expedite that move. Obviously this is anecdotal, and everyone has their own motives, but I haven't h…

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by throwaway_hey »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #38
komali2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Of course, but I didn't think it was necessary to state "all else being equal". In a conversation about why the same employer pays less to people if they move, it's strictly because they can and the employee doesn't have a choice to defect. Whereas in SF, the employee can walk around the corner and start working for someone else. Which is an illustration of the intersection of supply and demand.

You aren’t wrong, but we need to be careful when applying typical market economics to the labor market. It has its own field of study specifically because some of these relationships/intersections breakdown in the employee-employer relationship.

A classic example is the lack of perfect information in the labor market like you see in a commodities market. A more specific example is the wage-fixing scandal that hit tech companies [1]. In this case, the companies used their market power and unified to lower worker wages and stop them from crossing the street for more pay.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/google-adobe-apple-intel-settle-wa...

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