The Great Decentralization? Geographic shifts and where tech talent is moving

This is a good analysis. I think we're going to see an even more extreme selection of the more highly skilled individuals. The bigger the pool, the further you can go on the right tail of the pareto distribution. There's going to be a big influx of people moving to tax havens.

Especially considering the fact that highly sought out engs end up spending 90% of their time in meetings with teams across the globe, they're much more likely to continue being remote.

This year we finally moved to the US after 2 years of Covid-induced delays. We moved to Seattle because it's where my team is based.

I'm far from impressed. The housing market is so inaccessible that we had to rent a house about 1 hour commute from the office. I have hardly visited the offices a handful of times since we moved, and every time there is maybe 1 or 2 people there. Also this spring seems to be one of the wettest and coldest in recent memory.

So high prices, dreadful weather and no value from visiting the office is making us very seriously consider moving to a southern state. I have already brought this up and my manager is ok with me going fully remote and coming to the office on an as-needed basis. For anyone who has no roots or reason to stay here sounds like a no brainer.

Could it also be that the pageview method is not accurate?

The PNW has had an unusually rainy spring/early summer though, I think Seattle is usually a lot drier. The only silver lining might be fewer forest fires.

In my case I've been leaning hard into remote work for about 15 years now. Mostly for quality of life/access to nature. I've made real sacrifices to make that happen, but I'm glad to see the rest of the IT world is coming around to embracing us remote devs. It's still an uphill battle in many cases though.

I don't think you'll ever see me in a big city again, and I don't think I'm alone.

I feel like the dataset they've chosen is extremely noisy at the tail, but they've obscured this in their analysis. An 11% increase in Portland should be a lot more impactful (in absolute terms) than a big decrease in El Centro, which I can imagine could be caused by a single company moving.

I guess it's probably unrealistic to expect P-values in a blog post, though...