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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

It's a weird situation, because I was working remotely for a tech company and was required to move to the Boulder, CO area recently. It's an awesome company and I was stoked about the area, so I went ahead and did it, but the requirement for collocation that has been driven by certain management ethos' is odd in such a technology driven world.

The advantages I've had by moving from Arkansas to here have been numerous, and mainly this is due to human nature causing companies with enough co-located employees to leave remote workers out of the loop.

The OP is right though: I find the "herd effect" that occurs from a bunch of very similar people especially potent in SF. What's funny is how diverse they think they are based on superficial traits like maybe ethnicity, but the reality is they tend to be very uniform in socio-economic background, age, and education.

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And yet there are companies that think nothing of hiring offshore workers to replace local jobs. Sometimes within the same organization. Why is it that a company will require you to either be on-site, or in India, but nowhere else?

A lot of places simply are not structured to handle remote workers and penalize them when away from centralized offices. Remote work or distributed companies are an anomaly that present risks when your management doesn't understand the basics and that's understandable.

The presumption is that remote means lower value or productivity as a default in classic companies. It's not necessarily a matter of luxury either; your C levels don't work from their yachts in a marina normally. Some are just too rigid in approach to change how they work even if it's demonstrably negligible. I had a client before that had a mostly distributed team and wouldn't let us increase the hourly rate unless we relocated to an office - few people even at the offices ever talked that often and we hardly ever met in person with the client ourselves even for those five miles down the road.

The usual tech company reasoning now is that the tools for remote work do not facilitate creative, spontaneous insights that are critical for competitive companies.

From the company's perspective the job has to be one for which the company can reliably measure your output. If you're doing data entry for medical records the company can easily count the number of patients you've finished, the number of pages, even the number of keystrokes.

But for a developer working from home the company can't tell the difference between a bug that took three days of plugging away to find and one that you knocked out in twenty minutes before binge watching House of Cards on company time.

Most professionals have enough personal integrity to work when they say they're working, but the ones that don't can be very corrosive to morale and a big drag on productivity. I got the impression that's why Marissa Meyer forced everyone at Yahoo back into the office.

BULLSHIT!

I can damn well see when a issue has been entered in a bug tracker and when the bug has finally been marked fixed with the commit listed in the bug tracker..

So can everyone else including managers

This is where automation and proper process management come into play and sadly this is where many companies fall down. It's not that development productivity cannot be tracked it is that management generally does not understand the problem domain that they manage, well enough to put the proper measures and controls in place to identify inefficiencies.

Something as simple as a software review board, which places time estimates on a problem agreed on by a panel of at least 2 developers and then a process to check those estimations against actual results to find how far their estimation deviate from actuality across all developers, gives a fairly accurate picture of how long something should take and becomes more accurate over time. Further automation like linking the ticketing system to the SCM, so that when a branch is created for the issue the clock starts ticking and stops at checkin/smoke test, gives a pretty accurate picture of time spent on a task. Any developer that is deviating far below the low threshold is potentially wasting time and his/her work should be reviewed, as it is only an indicator that there may be a problem not conclusive proof.

I have worked remote for over 7 years, and currently reside in a very remote area for developers (Key West) and have no issue with remote development. Either a company has these process in place or I quickly put them in place. That or find other remote work as my only bad experiences have been with companies that do not have such measured in place. It's not a hard problem to solve one just needs to know the problem domain, most managers don't, so they just resort to the butts in seats management style and honestly without similar controls the same kind of time wasting can be employed, it just manifests itself differently but incompetent managers figure well they are here so work must be getting done.

Assign bug to me... Fix bug in 20 minutes... wait 3 days (binge watching netflix)... Commit fix, mark bug as fixed...

Relying too much on commits / tracking tools is a red flag of poor management.

If any of my team reported "still working on bug X" in the standup 3 days in row, without any significantly interesting details, I'd have assigned a few more people to help out.

BULLSHIT!

I can easily check the code in at the end of my television spree.

> But for a developer working from home the company can't tell the difference between a bug that took three days of plugging away to find and one that you knocked out in twenty minutes before binge watching House of Cards on company time.

I'm more productive this way. Having something like House of Cards on in the background provides enough distraction that I don't get distracted by other things, like HN. But if I were to do this in the office I doubt it would go over well.

As someone that also works in Boulder, is your compensation enough to allow you to actually live in Boulder?

Yeah, inquiring minds would like to know. I'm in Boulder right now for a conference, and looking at Zillow, it's f'ing insane. Prices seem to start at $1M.

Buying inside of Boulder is a bit insane right now, hell most of Colorado is, and it's just amplified by the lack of supply in Boulder (no new building for 20-30 some years I think).

Check out Gunbarrel, it's about 7 minutes away from Boulder and is still somewhat reasonable. Although my SO bought her 30yr old condo for $165K in the Fall of 2014 and Zillow is now saying 302K, LOL.

Lived in Boulder County for 15 years until I got married and moved south of Denver.

Boulder itself has ALWAYS been expensive (even when I was in college in the early 90s) for housing. If you're serious about relocating, look at some less insane, but very close communities that the majority of the "Boulderites" live in:

NORTH: - Longmont - Gunbarrel

EAST: - Louisville - Lafayette - Erie

SOUTHEAST-ish: - Broomfield - Westminster - Northglenn - Thornton

You can have a "reasonable" commute, and a less insane house price in those areas. They are all bedroom communities for the area... Personally, I lived in Louisville and Lafayette at least half of my time in the county (the other in Boulder proper, renting, always).

There are always options.

Yeah I'm finding it's basically impossible to purchase a house inside the city limits. Last weekend I saw an 850k two bedroom cottage on a half acre in Boulder, and a three bedroom (nearly twice as large, had a full basement) house on a full acre near downtown Longmont right off the BOLT line for 400k. It's not worth the price to live in Boulder when I can live 20 minutes away with enough room. Plus Longmont has fiber!

I've been working full time in Boulder for the past five years and I could get into the bottom end of the real estate market if I really wanted to - I started working straight out of college with no debt, but no equity either. I've stayed out because I've not felt my career stable enough to jump into that kind of long term investment. My company's been going through some ups and downs and cash in the bank seemed smarter than having it tied up in property. It also came in handy having some "f-you money" considering I just took two months of unpaid leave.

The cheapest house I've seen in Boulder has been around $450K. If you want a condo or town home in Boulder, you're looking at about $270K and that's probably going to be on the out skirts of town and built in the early 90s.

There's also permanently affordable housing. They are subsidized properties that you have to qualify to purchase, but you can't re-sell them for more than you bought them for. I've always made too much money to qualify, even right out of undergrad with a BS.

What's hilarious is that I make six figures, but because I have two kids and my wife is a stay-at-home mom, I'm "poor" enough to qualify.

However, like all programs like this that are a stupid fucking band-aid for NIMBY assholes interfering with the free market, they are neverr enough. It's an incredibly long line of people trying to get each home, and might as well be a lottery. These programs don't help the people they claim to. They are nothing more than ways for rich hippies to feel a little better after they vote for policies that set de-facto financial segregation firmly into place.

I recently moved back to the area from NorCal. Initially, 40% of my income was going to rent for a studio on the outskirts of Boulder. It's insane. Now I live with my SO and thankfully that's down to around 15%. I can't even imagine finding a place to buy now.

Someone call the CDC. Whatever California's got appears to be contagious.

I believe most call it "demand".

At one point, tulips were in "demand" as well -- bubbles and other irrational market behaviours are endemic to most economic systems.

You're talking about speculative bubbles. The high housing prices are not driven by speculation, they are driven by supply constraints.

People aren't buying houses to flip in six months, they are buying them to hold onto long-term. It's pretty clear that public policy isn't going to shift towards affordable housing any time soon. So the only options are: continue to pay high rents and wait for people to lose their jobs/homes so they can be bought cheaper, or buy now and hope you don't become one of the former.

If we start seeing houses sold multiple times in the same year, or people starting buying homes that they clearly can't afford, then we have a problem. But I don't see evidence that is where the US is. The housing shortage is ensuring that only those top earners are competing. Price are driven up by the fact that the top 20% of buyers can afford to outspend the bottom 80% on housing by a factor of 5 or more.

An additional $500/mo can cover another 100k for a 30 year mortgage. A couple making around $10k/mo after taxes can spend $5k/mo on a mortgage and still live comfortably while a median income couple earning maybe $4k/mo can only spend $2k/mo before things get tight. So, the high income couple can easily afford a million dollar mortgage, but could stretch that to $1.2MM if they really had to while the median earner can only spend $400k MAX.

I live in Broomfield. It's 100% affordable, and its pleasant. My son likes his schools, and Boulder is a short drive away anytime we want to visit. I see no reason to blow extreme amounts of money on a townhouse so I can have the luxury of having to be stuck in a rich town that excludes poor people for the sake of "open space". Housing policies like Boulder's aren't liberal, they're greedy. But hey, when I take my son hiking in Chattaqua, we get to count how many Tesla Model S and X's we see as a game.

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