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

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

#161

Post by smt88 »

switchbak wrote: post #147
smt88 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle weather is... polarizing... even in a more typical year. I personally find it hard to deal with so little sunshine.

Where I live gets about 2.5x as much rain as Seattle, and I consider it a big improvement over the East Coast (of Canada). It's all relative I guess.

I also live somewhere with far more rain than Seattle (US east coast), but we also have 2x the number of sunny days and our summers are much longer.

Rain in and of itself isn't bad if it's balanced out with sun and warmth.

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

#162

Post by listenallyall »

bin_bash wrote: post #124
gringoDan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would never recommend visiting Dallas, it's a dull city, but as far as places to live it's far surpassed my expectations. I think this point is key. When your day-to-day is spent staring at a laptop, it doesn't really matter where you live. I used to live in NYC. I loved it; great city to be in your 20s. But I left due to COVID. Since then, I've returned to visit a handful of times and realized that visiting NYC…

yeah I put this on another comment but different cities are great for different stages of your life. I lived in Santa Monica and SF (in the city) during my formative years and can't imagine a better way to have spent my 20's. In Dallas I would've been super bored and probably wouldn't have advanced in my career nearly as much. Do not move to Dallas if you're 23—that would be a poor life choice. I'm well into my 30's…

> Do not move to Dallas if you're 23

My company just transferred me to Dallas to trade equities. It's gonna be awesome!

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

#163

Post by jmoak3 »

ecshafer wrote: post #17

The top 10 metro areas list is interesting. Philadelphia, San Antonio, Houston, San Diego and Phoenix not on there despite all 5 being in the top 10 MSA and city population, while DC, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, Boston are on there. I am also shocked that Portland is growing. I went to Portland this year recently, it is the worst city in the country I have been to. 90% of downtown is boarded up, city is deserted, mas…

Yeah. I lived there 2016-2018, some of the best years of my life.

I moved back to PDX up from San Francisco in 2021 to try to settle in a fun place where I could buy a home and it was just a disaster. The stories people tell are both exaggerated and vastly understated.

I’ve since left, and I hope the best for the people there.

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

#164

Post by Tiktaalik »

EB66 wrote: post #88
bin_bash wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived all over the west coast my entire life but moved to the Dallas area (a place I'd never been to) somewhat recently. We're incredibly happy. The schools are outstanding, I've never seen a single homeless person in our town, and the crime rate is nonexistent. We bought a 4000sqft palace for half of what our last house cost. Cost of living generally is far lower. There is virtually never any traffic. People we…

> There isn't a lot of outdoorsy things to do aside from hanging out by the pool anyways though. The nature is ugly and there are no hills. That's primarily why people tolerate Seattle's climate. 9 months out of the year it will often be grey and rainy, but the natural wilderness is phenomenal exactly because of that. If you're into the outdoors, backpacking, fishing, kayaking, canoeing, mountain biking, trail runnin…

> Personally, the grey rainy weather was never really off putting for me. But that's probably because I was born here and I'm used to it. It's like that Bane quote from Batman: "Ah you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!"

haha same as me. I don't mind it but I'm used to it.

Though another colleague of mine from elsewhere has a better answer those that dislike the PNW winter. He'd assert that no, winter is the best time of the year in the PNW. Why? Because when it's raining in the city, it's snowing in the mountains. Learn to snowboard and it'll be your favourite time of year too.

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

#165

Post by Tiktaalik »

switchbak wrote: post #8
angarg12 wrote: post #4

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…

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 st…

June is often a bit wetter than one would think (calling it Juneuary is the joke), but it has been an incredibly and insanely cold and rainy spring this year.

In Vancouver I think it was a day in early May that was the coldest on record with the temperature not even reaching 10 degrees celsius.

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

#166

Post by lumost »

This looks like a natural reaction to remote work. My anecdotal observation is that companies are giving up the ghost of offices, but employees are hesitant to commit to a full-time remote world for fear that their employer will pull them back one day. Even if the employer decides not to pull them back, there is no guarantee that they will find the next in a remote world.

But, in the middle of the day - I still see empty offices all across town. At some point something is going to give.

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

#167

Post by grej »

amyjess wrote: post #137
kodah wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Texas is still overwhelmingly and overly conservative, so that might be a big drag. Kind of, keep in mind ~50% of Texas votes Democrat, Republicans just squeeze wins. Also keep in mind that Texas Democrats are not like national Democrats, and I'd hardly call Austin something like "progressive". It marches to its own tune, which is just fine for Texas.

It doesn't matter how the local government votes as long as the state government is run by people who are actively committed to making LGBTQ+ people's lives hell. The state government is actively criminalizing any kind of gender-affirming treatment for LGBTQ+ youth, and there's nothing the local governments in Dallas or Austin can do about it. If I had kids, I would have already uprooted my family and left the state…

I hope you hang in there, friend. I don’t know how long it will take, but I’m optimistic and hopeful that the state will not support the kind of extreme social positions the party in power is driving beyond maybe another two or three election cycles max.

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

#168

Post by jmac01 »

Wish this would include outside of US. I know a lot of people who've moved away from US as multinational companies become fully remote allowing workers to work anywhere. It'd be great to get info on potential "tech hubs" forming around the world.

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

#169

Post by astrange »

jsdwarf wrote: post #18
adamhi wrote: post #3

Keep in mind that they're really measuring pageviews to Stackoverflow, not actual data about movement. My intuition is that it's probably right, but this is suggestive at best.

Isn't the SO pageview data skewed by the fact that most remote workers are on their company's VPN, hiding their true location?

Are most work VPNs full-tunnel?

I thought Google didn't even use VPNs.

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

#170

Post by astrange »

ecshafer wrote: post #105
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I went to Portland this year recently, it is the worst city in the country I have been to. 90% of downtown is boarded up, city is deserted, massive homelessness crisis. I had the opposite response, but I guess I've been in San Francisco. All the locals were scared of downtown. Yes, it was boarded up. But it was safe. One homeless guy was being talked to by a cop because he was yelling. (They were all sitting cross…

In the week I was there I saw people be physically attacked twice, once at a tram stop and once at a restaurant. This is on top of maybe a dozen other "incidences". I spend a lot of time in Philly and New York both, and that's beyond the pale for either of those cities.

Isn't Philly famous mostly because its inhabitants like to get in fights and throw batteries at people at sports games?
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