Hacker News Reader

Comment by sien | Hacker News Reader

Truckee looks pretty great for this sort of thing. It's only 35 minutes drive from Reno too. So getting out and getting fancier food or whatever is very much doable for an evening.

It's interesting that more people don't move to places like this. Perhaps the difficulty of obtaining well paid work is the hard part.

View on HN

I live in a ski resort and work remotely in tech.

While it has its upsides, which are obvious, there are some downsides.

Winters can feel long. Like 9 months long. The “slack” season between spring snow melting and summer can feel never ending. Same with fall; too cold to do much, but no snow. Town is empty, businesses shut down and shorten hours.

It’s easy to get feel isolated. It’s easy to not see much sun shine for days or weeks at a time.

January and February are generally great, but tourists can get annoying. Same with July and August. 4/12 would recommend.

Truckee is relatively expensive given the demand for second homes for wealthy coastal types.

Why not just cross the border? Incline Village is great and you avoid CA taxes

As more and more skilled work moves online and becomes disintermediated we’ll see more of that. I’m guessing that upwork and similar websites are the start of that though they still have the problem that they’re a market for lemons, people who are good learn relatively quickly they can get better pay outside them. Software is probably the leading edge of the sectors that lots of knowledge work will eventually follow. You have marketplaces like instapainting.com for art work. I’m sure there are others and if there aren’t it’s an opportunity some software entrepreneurs will exploit.

For tech people you almost /have/ to find remote work. We moved to a remote part of Indiana for my wife's job and the only local tech job I've found offered 1 week vacation and less money than I made out of college 15 years ago.

There are perks like having a 4500sq ft home on almost 2 aces of land for a mortgage much smaller than what I see a studio rent for in SF. On the other hand there's only a couple of truly good restaurants in the area, the rest is low end fast food (McDs and the like). The nearest Chipotle, for instance, is 45 minutes away. And the night scene.. it ends around 10pm.

The first town mentioned in the article is Yellow Springs, OH. That's very close to Dayton and Springfield, two decently sized cities. On top of that's it's about an hour away from Columbus and Cincinnati, both of which have tons of nightlife, restaurants and competitive tech jobs.

But how many people long for "the small town" just to commute 2+ hours a day?

Some people commute 2+ hours in the Bay Area too

Yellow Springs is actually a neat little town on its own, with several good restaurants and coffee shops and stores. It has a reputation as sort of a hippie town. And Dave Chappelle lives there. Probably not a lot of nightlife or jobs, though.

Purchasing a house in Truckee, while not Palo Alto expensive, still isn’t cheap. There are some decent restaurants there. Reno can actually be surprising when it comes to food choices.

If one relies on work in the Bay Area, the remoteness can add a bit of anxiety. Driving to the Bay Area can also be a drag.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com