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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

I live in a town higher ranked than Olathe on those lists, and I've move to San Fran in a heartbeat. When your claim to fame is a list in a magazine somewhere, you are missing the point. Some people like living in a city. Some people like living near THE OCEAN. Some people have spouses with great jobs in the city they live in. There are more software jobs in San Fran to get, there is not San Fransisco in Olathe Kansas.

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Right, people are free to enjoy living by the ocean. It's just kind of suspicious when a block of people balk at the concept of living in not California like this. Relocations are not that unusual in big corporate world, and most employees understand that their job could get relocated at any time. Most are willing to do that. It is unusual that a whole unit would refuse, and seems indicative to me of an unjustified prejudice. Maybe I'm just overly biased and they all have sick mothers in SF to care for.

And Olathe's claim to fame is not "a list in a magazine somewhere", that's distorting my point. I linked to a whole page of awards and emphasized the most recognizable. I used these awards, and that award specifically, to indicate to people that Olathe is a real modern place, not a podunk with four buildings like people seem to think when they hear "Kansas". I used them in conjunction with other anecdotes and data. You're distorting my argument to marginalize the place, again. I don't why there's so much disdain for not-California among people.

Some people like SF and that's fine. I don't want everyone from San Francisco to move to Olathe. But I don't like how there are just a handful of places that people consider "acceptable" and everything else is "flyover country". There is real life and existence, normal people, normal existence, normal cities with normal roads and normal stores, outside of California and New England. People disdainfully refer to everything else as "flyover country", and perhaps even refuse en masse to relocate to some place as humble as Kansas, surely not big enough to contain those people, and it's just really silly imo. There's nothing wrong with Olathe.

I'm all for people living where they want. I agree that Kansas isn't the right place for everyone. I am simply annoyed by the assumptions heretofore described, and that this group refuses to even give the place a try.

You're assuming what made them balk. I see more assumptions in what you've said than in what they said.

Just like sexy people don't have to say they're sexy, great places to live don't have to send their PR people out to badger/bribe magazines into putting them into silly lists.

It's irrelevant how awesome Olathe is. Relocation is a big deal for very personal reasons. The GC Team decided against it. What is most spectacular is the way they have dealt with the situation. They are blunt, but respectful. They are confident, but not arrogant. Anyone looking for a team to develop mobile devices would be drooling at their mouths over this.

" Relocations are not that unusual in big corporate world, and most employees understand that their job could get relocated at any time."

That attitude comes from a different era. That "most employees understand" thing came from a time when there was something called "Job Security" so people understood that in return for moving, they had a reasonably good chance at keeping their jobs.

In this day and age, where you live in an at-will employment world, I know of _nobody_ in the bay-area technology scene who would relocate to kansas from California. Can you imagine what would happen if you relocated to Kansas and then were laid off? Olathe doesn't even have a Craigslist entry. The closest entry I could find was Kansas City, and the Bay area has about 15x to 20x the number of job listings.

I'm in absolute love with Vancouver, British Columbia, and one day, if I'm very lucky, hope to return there, (I visit about 4-5 times a year, my heart really is in that city) - but I couldn't rationally relocate my career out of the valley.

There is a different between being a wonderful place to work, and a wonderful place to live.

There's also much, much more competition for positions in CA. I never had an especially difficult time finding work in KC.

Olathe is a suburb and is a part of the greater Kansas City metro. Kansas City is about twenty miles away.

Problem #1 with that scenario, is I manage fairly Sr. Network Engineering groups. Should I lose my Job in the Greater Kansas City area, there is probably a grand total of a dozen companies who would be interested in hiring someone who deploys Cisco 6509s by the truckload. And, other than Sprint and the Military, I suspect there is nobody out there particularly interested in the deployment of IPv6.

Meanwhile, in Redwood City alone, within walking distance from my house, I can count about 20 companies who might reasonably employ me.

I'll agree there isn't as much competition, but, the high end positions are _very_ few and far between.

Actually there isn't as much competition as you think. There are more employers here in the Bay Area than there are available employees to hire. The only way to get employees for a new company here is to snipe employees from another company. The last time I attended a job fair here (approximately 2 months ago), I had no less than 15 job interviews thrown at me.

Also, it's great to have many "competitor" companies working within a few miles of each other. If you decided to leave a company like Playfish, all the competitor companies like Zynga, Rock You, and Playdom will want to snatch you up in a hurry.

This is off-topic, but I've heard a surprising number of people in the valley say precisely that about Vancouver. I figure if you all just move there, at once, that the problem will solve itself. Actually coordinating that is impossible, of course, though setting up a #sfo2yvr mailing list might be a good idea...

But if we could coordinating all "just moving there", en masse, we could move to Detroit where the land is dirt cheap. I could buy a whole city block in Detroit for what I pay in one month's rent. If I brought along a few friends, we could buy up the city, start a technology hub, and become the modern-day Astors as the price of real estate shoots through the roof.

Except that then we'd have to deal with taxes, and corrupt city government (ok, SF isn't much better in that regard), and paying a private security force so we don't get shot, and fixing up houses that are in worse-than-teardown condition. And when I just want to write software - it's probably not worth the hassle. Organizing a mass relocation can be a pretty big drag.

It's a bit of an aside, but Vancouver is really coming into its own as a technology hub. Over even the last 2 years, the number of new startups seems to have grown exponentially. One day could be very soon; and if it is, feel free to get in touch @nickmolnar. We need more good engineers.

I've relocated to "Middle of Nowhere, US" before for work. It's fine as long as you get a good salary and live in a city with a low cost of living, but you need to ask yourself a few questions first:

1. If you lose your job working for Megacorp, who else is willing to hire a senior software/hardware engineer in the state?

2. What kind of salary would you even get from the 1 or 2 tech companies in the area? These companies know they are the only shop in town and probably only pay $50-60K/yr. for senior level positions.

3. What type of quality of life are you going to have? Are there any artistic or cultural activities in the area?

If you can answer these questions positively, I say go for it. Personally, I'd rather live on either coast and make 6 figures than live in flyover country any day. If I want, I can work on the coast for 20 years and save enough money to live comfortably in flyover country the rest of my life.

And you're assuming a massive amount about these people. I don't live in California, in fact you'd probably find me dead before you'd find me living in most parts of California other than San Fran or San Diego (certainly not LA thats for sure). I'd probably rather live in Kansas than an equivalent city in California simply to avoid the horrible taxes and dysfunctional gov't.

But I do get the desire to live in a big city over a suburb. I've worked in a city for the last few years after growing up in a suburb, and waking up in the morning and walking through the energy of a city is just different than waking up, getting in your car, slogging through traffic to work, parking in a giant lot, and going into a corporate office park for the day. Just something like lunch is vastly different in a city vs. a suburb, and that kind of stuff matters.

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