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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

#161

Post by bariswheel »

dragonwriter wrote: post #156
emanuensis wrote: post #151

People LIKE to live on the edge. It is an unfortunate fact ... especially given their are 9B of us. Super bad for the ecology, the encountering of new diseases etc. Suburbs Exurbs, retreats... never ends. If we had a Home (like most animals) we would have to worry much less about despoliation and ravages like fires. Why not have a home to live in and allow ourselves rest, relaxation and recovery in an unspoiled wilde…

> It is an unfortunate fact ... especially given their are 9B of us. The current estimate I see most places is 7.8B, where does 9B come from?

I think their writing was supposed to be interpreted a bit performance art'ish.

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

#162

Post by emanuensis »

dragonwriter wrote: post #156
emanuensis wrote: post #151

People LIKE to live on the edge. It is an unfortunate fact ... especially given their are 9B of us. Super bad for the ecology, the encountering of new diseases etc. Suburbs Exurbs, retreats... never ends. If we had a Home (like most animals) we would have to worry much less about despoliation and ravages like fires. Why not have a home to live in and allow ourselves rest, relaxation and recovery in an unspoiled wilde…

> It is an unfortunate fact ... especially given their are 9B of us. The current estimate I see most places is 7.8B, where does 9B come from?

:) Whew! So glad! The planet might actually survive 38.9678 days more!

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

#163

Post by conductr »

duxup wrote: post #9
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 worked for a valley company that changed people's salary if they moved to a new office. Work in the valley, make more, if you moved they'd lower your pay. Midwest salaries were notably lower. Oddly enough it was more of a issue brought up by folks at HQ as they knew they were more expensive and a particular group was really paranoid about it... like constantly. It was a bad scene.

I have a similar but totally different example from a non-tech field. I live in Texas. We had an office in Bay Area. Sometime we had people in Texas that reported to a higher level people in Bay Area.

For whatever reason, market rate of pay in Bay Area for this field was similar to the market in Texas. However COL had a large variance. We were a pretty tight bunch that knew basic details of each other’s personal lives. It was crazy the amount of subtle strife this dynamic caused. When someone in Texas buys a large home and a new BMW or is traveling all the time. And their peer or even boss in Bay Area is struggling to split an apartment with a roommate well after “roommate appropriate age” by Texas standards.

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

#164

Post by burlesona »

asdff wrote: post #113
floor2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing worth remembering - thousands of current "Bay area tech workers" grew up in other parts of the country, and moved to silicon valley primarily for job opportunities, but may not otherwise share in the religious, political or social views that dominate that space. So while in some cases there may be the conflict you're alluding to, for other people, they're just moving back home.

That's precisely the math that people are weighing. Live in comparative squalor in the bay or nyc in your cramped apartment with no grass and no light and little opportunity for change as time goes by and your family potentially grows, or move back home and live like an absolute king in a legitimate mansion with yards on all sides with a three car garage, basketball hoop, and a pool in that rich rich neighborhood wit…

Space in big cities comes at a premium, but tech workers living in SF have hardly been living in squalor. Most of SF is single family homes, and the vast Bay Area beyond even more so.

Also, having done the spreadsheet many times myself, it’s almost never a raise to move to a low-cost area.

The reason people make that move is that they’ve accumulated so much wealth in SF that they can basically retire so long as they move to a low cost area.

Some people want to do that, and retire very young. Some people don’t, so they stay around until they’re wealthy enough to even afford nice properties in the bay area.

The reason for this giant shift, however, is very simply that the vast majority of city life is either closed or greatly impeded at the moment. So the experience of city life has been significantly degraded, and thus many people are now shifting toward places that offer very little except for nice, cheap property, and thus make a good place to hole up and hide out the pandemic.

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

#165

Post by wbl »

abeppu wrote: post #145

I wonder when the reverse will happen. As rents in SF dive, will people that were force to outlying parts of the Bay Area return? Will younger LGBT folk be able to afford to live in/near the Castro? Will more people _not_ in tech be able to live here? SF has felt like such a one-industry town for quite a while, and that can mute some of the richness and diversity that normally makes cities interesting (and perhaps mo…

SF rents are still ridiculously high. The city don't be more diverse until it becomes a real metropolis of several million people.

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

#166

Post by ryanobjc »

monoideism wrote: post #132
silicon2401 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The dispersal of bay area tech workers will be good for the country, if we can avoid breaking down in the immediate future. SV had become a total thought bubble, with the average tech worker having either no conception or a very negative conception of how most of the country lives outside of the large urban areas. Moving into areas with lots of moderates or conservatives will be a good learning experience. I don't ex…

Nearly all my colleagues and friends here in the Bay Area are from somewhere else.

So this idea of a totally isolated bubble is a fiction made up on few facts to sell a story.

And most people are fairly tolerant - except of the intolerable few who wish to destroy tolerance. Again more made up stories.

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

#167

Post by chasd00 »

blantonl wrote: post #82

I own a number of pieces of property in Whitefish Montana, where I decamped to the second my children were released from school for COVID reasons in March (we split time between TX and MT). Given what I felt were going to be significant economic disruptions due to unemployment and drops in income, I prepared myself with the understanding that our little resort town was going to be facing some hard times. Usually, sma…

i just bought 18 acres on the direct border of the Ouachita National Forest in SE Oklahoma for reasons outside the pandemic (i live in Dallas, about 4hrs away). The real estate person said all land is gone within days of listing. They're selling at $7-8k/acre what was $1-2k/acre just a couple years ago. People are flocking to the country side.

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

#168

Post by chasd00 »

davidw wrote: post #102
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…

Another thing I'm curious about is what the distribution will be like. Smooth, across a wide range of places - anywhere with a decent internet connection - or will people follow previously trodden paths to places like Boulder or where I am in Bend, Oregon? There are plenty of towns with lots of outdoor access in Oregon that are cheap because the mill closed. But they are not 'hot' destinations.

if starlink comes online as scheduled then all bets are off. You'll see tech workers on the mountain tops of the Rockies i bet.

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

#169

Post by throwaway_hey »

ticmasta wrote: post #122
throwaway_hey wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tec…

wouldn't the wage fixing scandal, which was essentially illegal oligopolistic behaviour, be an example of how a larger market, wider area supply/demand relationship would look more like the classic economic model, i.e., this exact case?

There isn’t an open market where the worker can get a clear market value for their salary. The companies hold far more information than each worker. Nuances like this non-clearing behavior, geographic forces, compensating differentials, and monopsonies make labor economics it’s own field of study.

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

#170

Post by shiftpgdn »

chasd00 wrote: post #167
blantonl wrote: post #82

I own a number of pieces of property in Whitefish Montana, where I decamped to the second my children were released from school for COVID reasons in March (we split time between TX and MT). Given what I felt were going to be significant economic disruptions due to unemployment and drops in income, I prepared myself with the understanding that our little resort town was going to be facing some hard times. Usually, sma…

i just bought 18 acres on the direct border of the Ouachita National Forest in SE Oklahoma for reasons outside the pandemic (i live in Dallas, about 4hrs away). The real estate person said all land is gone within days of listing. They're selling at $7-8k/acre what was $1-2k/acre just a couple years ago. People are flocking to the country side.

I don't think it's a permanent move though. People are buying summer/weekend homes or property which already had constrained supply.
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