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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

#211

Post by conanbatt »

ponker wrote: post #196
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…

Depends on what happens with crime and “quality of life.” People will step in human turd to get to a job that pays them $400K. They won’t do that to have access to great coffee shops. You’ll at best get the marginally employed bohemians if you don’t solve the crime and homelessness crises.

The tax rate being so high, and expenses so low that it makes living in SF not clearly the optimal economic output. And multiply that effect by 10 when you have kids.

Just school for 3 kids would be, say, 100k after taxes, which would mean you need to earn 150k just to pay school. At 400k your tax rate in california is through the roof.

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

#212

Post by triceratops »

sokoloff wrote: post #128
triceratops wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but I did not understand your comment at all. Some of those sentences don't parse for me. I don't know what you're trying to say. Can you please clarify?

It seemed clear enough to me. Your salary is less than or equal to the value you add (companies will usually not knowingly pay you more than you’re worth), not equal to it. The rest was expanding on that core point by computing the expected profit a company gains by hiring someone (value - salary [minus total costs, actually]) and that a company will seek to maximize its profits.

I guess I was confused by the use of the pronoun "it" right at the beginning. With no context, I had trouble deciding what it mean, or deciphering much of the post. What you explained is the only bit I was able to guess at on my own, mostly because it's common sense.

The part about the mathematical viability of fairness was particularly quite puzzling.

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

#213

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

That really isn’t unprecedented. SF in the 70s and 80s got pretty grimey, attracting younger and more eclectic people who could afford the rents. Those people in turn make the area more desirable, attracting gentrification and then...well, equilibriums win in the long run.

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

#214

Post by conanbatt »

SilasX wrote: post #16
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…

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.

Its not the location, is the competition pool. When you become remote, you now increase the competition by a lot of people that also want to work remote, if not half the world.

Its very imprecise to base salary on location, but if remote were just as competitive as in-office, you wouldn't hear people asking to get paid the same when they go remote

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

#215

Post by conanbatt »

mr_woozy wrote: post #110
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…

Technically while you are correct that it should make no salary difference where workers choose to base themselves, unfortunately corporations and HR will use this as a sorting metric to pay qualified workers less because it's only to their advantage to do so. While you'd think the worker would benefit from being more globally employable the companies conversely have a larger pool of candidates now to choose from, wh…

Companies don't decide how much to pay, its the result of competing forces on supply and demand

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

#216

Post by asdff »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #152
asdff wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't you see that this is the kind of framing that rubs people the wrong way? There's nothing wrong with having different preferences, but it's frustrating for Bay Area natives to constantly hear that it's a terrible place nobody could enjoy on its own terms.

I mean sure, but eventually you come to a reckoning of what you truly get out of an area. Is it nice restaurants? Bars? Parks? You can have those elsewhere. Walkable neighborhoods with transit exist elsewhere too. Museums, art, plays, concerts, operas, orchestras, too.

At some point you have to square with the fact that your 2 million dollar home in the bay area is an order of magnitude more expensive than a comparable home in a dozen more or less comparable places, given that you'd be working from home at the same rate anyway (in this hypothetical). And then you'd have plenty of money left over to fly back to the bay whenever you'd like.

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

#217

Post by meekrohprocess »

newusr1233 wrote: post #150

I wonder if this is just a fad until people realize they don't actually like the rural life as much as they think they would.

Probably. I loved touring the US parks while doing remote work, and I miss the freedom of being able to wander around anywhere and sort of ignore roads, but I wouldn't have been able to live in many of the areas that I adored.

One thing that people underestimate about the US is its vast size. When you live in a city, you have at least a dozen grocery stores within an hour's drive. When you live in a rural area, you drive at least an hour into "the city" which has a Walmart and a Kroger.

There are exceptions, like Utah which is basically one giant city/suburb/church running along the Great Salt Lake with a half-dozen national parks to the South. But I would lean towards this being a temporary trend for most people.

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

#218

Post by strangegecko »

humanrebar wrote: post #149
throwawaygh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay for software engineering will contract because it turns out programming is not that difficult and there was nothing special about the sf set except their need to cover stupid high rents.

Not quite. Consider pay for athletes and entertainers. Why pay Robert Downey Jr. big bucks? There are millions of actors out there! No, there could be a long tail of meagerly paid folks, just like baristas who aspire to be professional singers. But some folks (allegedly the best of the best somehow) will be getting top dollar.

Robert Downey Jr. is paid more because of brand recognition in the target market (people will watch a movie just because he's in it), not because he's a much better actor than everyone else.

Software developers don't really have that. Maybe if you're John Romero people buy your games without looking too closely, but it's pretty rare in comparison.

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

#219

Post by asdff »

whimsicalism wrote: post #187
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For about 30 years cities were relatively undesirable places to live in for the average person. The cities that young people have flocked to in the last decade or so are designed and developed more like large scale open shopping malls than the cities of the 70s and 80s. The closest comparison to what's happening now was "White flight", a largely racist reaction to the civil rights movement involving increased protest…

I don't see how your comment is at odds with what you're replying to. > cities are becoming visibly less safe Hm, I do not think this is true.

It's true in LA at least. Petty crime is unenforced and people are well aware of that fact. I've seen people smoking crack or shooting up in broad daylight plenty of times this year, sometimes in front of city workers who do not care. Seems like there is an assault or a stabbing or shooting every day in Hollywood now. People getting drunk every weekend playing with guns on Hollywood blvd watching some other drunk dumbass do donuts at the intersection and the LAPD doesn't care. 17 year old bystander was killed at one of these events in the summer (1). Yesterday a 70 year old man was killed in Venice when someone tried to steal his bike from him (2).

It's been getting worse the last couple of years, but noticeably more amped up since covid killed a lot of foot traffic and therefore community surveillance that seemingly kept a lot of this belligerent behavior in check. Not sure how things are going back east, but it's getting pretty gritty over here.

1. https://abc7.com/hollywood-shooting-street-race-fatal-teen-k...

2. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/73-year-old-man-die...

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

#220

Post by tylerjwilk00 »

refurb wrote: post #185
code4tee wrote: post #59

I saw a great quote recently that said something like “Everyone loves work from home until you lose a deal to the competition that turned up to your customer in person.” There’s an element of truth to this. Best advice I’ve heard is to say the draw for living in a city may go away but you need to be close. Living in the middle of nowhere isn’t going to look like such a great idea when people start gathering together…

To add on top of that, what about just general travel or business travel? I could understand moving away from the bay area, but living in a remote town has it's costs. Need to jump on a plane for a business meeting? Well, now you're driving 2 hours to the airport and then connecting to some hub. I've done it in the past, it adds a ton of friction to travel.

Reducing wasteful polluting plane travel is a bonus not a bug.

The "space" dimension is so overrated when it comes to meetings.

If that is the only thing that has been keeping cities together then they're doomed.

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