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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Because there is no critical mass to "work from anywhere".

Amazon/Facebook/Google/Microsoft doesn't let its workers work from home in general. A lot of tech companies don't as well. So moving to CheapSmallTown means when losing the job still having to go back to ExpensiveTechHub to network and find a new job. So might as well stay in ExpensiveTechHub just to be sure.

Imagine if all those large tech companies and others allowed working from home as a default. I think that would be a sizeable economic and cultural shift. It might revitalize various part of the country, small cities and towns. It might reduce congestion, real estate prices in coastal cities.

I work from home and love it. But yeah I am still living next to a tech hub because chances are if I switch jobs I might not necessarily have a choice of working from home.

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It's worth pointing out that the "big four" tech companies aren't the only tech companies worth working at. You could very well have a higher upside working at a small, remotely friendly company, from Chiang Mai or Bali where the cost of living is 1/15th of SF, and still have a relative mass of expats doing similar things.

Speaking from experience, I'm much more relaxed working from Bali, and I get paid only 20% less than I did in SF. Instead of spending 35% of my net pay on rent, I only spend 2.9% and have a higher quality of life in general.

When all your hard earned money goes to just maintaining social status or staying in a trendy neighbourhood, what have you got to show for it?

> and I get paid only 20% less than I did in SF

Out of curiosity, did you start your current job while in SF and then moved? Or did you find the job while you were already overseas? If the latter, was the hiring process remote too?

In my case (and a couple of friends) the remote salary was slightly less than your typical SF salary but I had no "fixed location". Right now I'm in London working for a different company but the job is also remote. The point of working remotely should never be "find very cheap talent" but rather "find talent globally and remove geographical bottlenecks". Or something like that.

When negotiating a salary, don't let your current location define your salary because in a couple of months you could be in London, SF, NYC or Tokyo.

Would you mind exchanging emails? I would love to ask you more specifics about your experience as I am thinking of doing the same. Email in my profile.

>It's worth pointing out that the "big four" tech companies aren't the only tech companies worth working at.

They're not, but there's lots of other large-to-midsize tech companies out there that people don't mention when they mention the Big Four, because they're mostly the same. They're in the same locations, and work largely the same.

>You could very well have a higher upside working at a small, remotely friendly company, from Chiang Mai or Bali where the cost of living is 1/15th of SF, and still have a relative mass of expats doing similar things.

The problem here is: what happens when you get laid off? Now you're screwed, because you weren't getting paid much (you say you only get 20% of SF salaries; that won't even leave you enough left over to move back to the States and make a down-payment on a house or a 2-month deposit and 1st month's rent), so you don't have any savings worth anything, and now you're unemployed and have zero hope of a new job in some foreign country.

This is why attempts to "insource", or locate tech companies in cheaper parts of the US, never work out well. You can't get many workers to pack up and take a huge risk moving to the middle of nowhere, where there's only one employer. If they get laid off in a month or two, they're really screwed. So people stay in the tech-hub cities where there's plenty of other jobs in case something goes wrong. It's all about minimizing risk.

This isn't cut-and-dry. There are plenty of opportunities to work in cheap parts of the country (US). If I lost my job (or more than likely, quit on my own terms, which I've done many times before, even before I had a position lined up), I wouldn't be concerned with finding another one within 2 weeks. Every day I'm responding to recruiters on LinkedIn looking for talent. And I'm not that talented.

There are even requests around the geographical region, which I consider if I hadn't had a family and mortgage.

I can utilize all the cutting-edge technologies developers on the coasts think they're privy to, too.

This flyover mentality gets me so worked up. It's really from a pre-internet era.

I can see your argument for doing so in another country (relocation, other added expenses vs. U-Haul across the country), but I'm making the assumption there's more than one fruit farmer there, too.

Yes, there are plenty of opportunities to work in cheap parts of the US. I get emails from recruiters for jobs in these places all the time. The problem is, these opportunities are not in the same place! So if I were to take one of them, I would then be working in a town where my employer is the only place that hires people with my skills, and if that job goes bad, now I'm forced to sell my house and move, because there's no other employer within commuting distance. This is why tech hubs are so popular, and why they're "tech hubs": they achieve the critical mass needed to turn them into such.

I'm sorry, but I simply do not feel comfortable taking on a giant risk by signing up for a house mortgage in a city where I will be forced to move out if something goes wrong with my job. I don't think I'm the only person who thinks that way.

Your commuting requirements list must be very large.

"Amazon/Facebook/Google/Microsoft doesn't let its workers work from home in general."

I worked at Facebook as a software engineer in the Menlo park office and I used to work from home at least several times a month. I'm pretty sure google allows you to this as well. They don't allow you to do this permanently however.

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