Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

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" 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.

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.

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.

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