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Adding on:

We've also had a housing crisis which is keeping many people chained to their current regions due to underwater mortgages and no housing sales. 5 years ago people could move their families across country for a good job. Even if they want to now, they can't. This is just not acknowledged by most companies.

I was approached a couple years ago by a company that was starting up - 'ex google founders' and all that. The product/service was pitched to me as a collaboration/communication tool to help remote teams work more effectively. Sounded great, but I was not allowed to work remote. I had to upsticks and move to SF. To work on a remote collaboration tool. WTF?

how did their product end up turning out, out of curiosity?

I never followed up and they never gave me the full name until I'd sign an NDA (which I didn't).

well in all fairness their product was not developed yet!

There really is a huge difference between working in person with someone and working remotely. I've seen misunderstandings that could waste literally weeks of programmer time get corrected by a 15-minute pair-programming session.

It doesn't really surprise me that ex-Googlers would insist you work in person. As a large multinational, Google feels the pain of distributed teams more than many companies, which is probably why they're founding their startup. It'd probably sink their startup if one of their key employees was not working in person with them.

> I've seen misunderstandings that could waste literally weeks of programmer time get corrected by a 15-minute pair-programming session.

Are they things that wouldn't have similarly been resolved by remote pairing?

With what tools? In theory, if you have a shared screen, and real-time voice communication, and remote whiteboards, and ideally real-time video, it should be basically the same as being there. The technology to do this is very, very expensive at the moment, though, which is presumably the raison d'etre of this startup.

You also miss out a lot on serendipity. Many of the best ideas that eventually become actual Google products happen because a bunch of folks are hanging out over beers, or they're sharing the latest cool thing they've stumbled across on the Internet, or they're shooting each other with nerf darts before going home. This sort of relaxed socialization seems to be exactly what you need to get creative ideas to bubble up to the surface. When you have to feel like you're "on a call" to get together with someone, you don't get this sort of spontaneous idea generation.

>> With what tools? In theory, if you have a shared screen

VNC, emacs

>> and real-time voice communication,

telephone

>> and remote whiteboards, and ideally real-time video

projector, webcams, monitor

>> The technology to do this is very, very expensive at the moment, though, which is presumably the raison d'etre of this startup.

When you are considering $75k versus $150k per year, the above is not expensive

>In theory, if you have a shared screen, Webmeeting

>real-time voice communication Webmeeting

>remote whiteboards, Webmeeting

>ideally real-time video skype

> When you have to feel like you're "on a call" to get together with someone, you don't get this sort of spontaneous idea generation.

Some of our best ideas at a previous startup came straight out of our Scrum meetings: when we had the CEO, the COO, and everyone all arguing (no bruises, but close sometimes) about what we should/could do next. I'd like to try that over web conf.

Plus, you still get the idea generation from external techie meetings. I'm in San Diego. I'm not moving to NYC. But we still have a great tech scene.

It did strike me as odd that if they're trying to solve that problem, having some people, you know, actually work remotely, would in fact indicate if the product was solving problems - dogfooding and all that.

I've felt those "week vs 15 minute" issues. Some of that is developer-specific, no doubt, but that's fundamentally a communication issue that needs to be managed.

I've also worked gigs where people were in the same room and didn't talk to each other, or wouldn't answer emails due to office politics, and in general stuff that should have taken 15 minutes still took a week, even though everyone was in the same building.

The underwater mortgages are a very good point. Many engineers bought expensive houses and are now chained to them. It is not unprecedented for companies to cover full relocation, including when necessary buying the dud house themselves from the new employee at a price that allows him to move.

Most startup jobs in NYC pay over $100K if you're an engineer. If you have a family and need a bigger place you can always live in New Jersey. "Money" is not really a problem in New York City. If you're smart and hustle in NYC, you can always make more money. You will probably have to do something heinous to get it, but it's sitting there, waiting for you.

That said, many hackers just aren't into the sort of startup projects that get funded and pay well in NYC. That's a bigger factor in the "talent shortage." The startups there just aren't that cool. If someone in Brooklyn started a company making life-sized Gundam robots you could control with your web browser, everyone would quit working at whatever foodie-blog-ad-network they're currently stuck at and work at the robot place for half their previous salary.

It's hard to do outsourced work in an early stage startup because stuff changes so frequently. The last startup I worked for in NYC actually did have a half dozen outsourced employees in places like Oregon and Hawaii and all but one of them quit because they were so frustrated about changing priorities and miscommunication.

re: "Money" - a $100k job in NYC with living in NJ just isn't going to get you anywhere close the same living space (especially for a family) as that same money would in most of the rest of the US. Similarly, $150k+ would go a long way to help make up that difference.

Ultimately, it's just not a lifestyle tradeoff most engineering talent seems to want to make at those price points. Upping base to $150k (with something closer to $200k for sr-level talent) for startup engineers (vs ~$100k) would attract more talent the companies are claiming they need. If that's too expensive, perhaps 'startups' should locate themselves closer to where the resources they need are actually located?

Those issues of 'miscommunication' and 'changing priorities' are happening regardless of where the workers are, and I bet many people working at the main office were similarly frustrated.

I've worked on site and remotely, and understand the challenges in each. Neither is perfect, and having a remote team (and being a remote developer) requires certain skills. I'm dismayed, but perhaps not surprised, that these skills aren't actively developed and nurtured at more companies. The long term rewards will be great.

Quality of life depends on what you value.

If you value living space, you'll be happiest out of NYC.

But if you value meeting a lot of cool people, great things to see and do, great mass transit, etc then NYC is great even at a lesser overall level of purchasing power.

Agreed, I recently moved to Columbus, Ohio from Boston. Kept my (decent) salary from Boston. I have 3x the space I had prior, super low expenses and I'm in the top 10% of income here by household.

Am I as happy as I was in Boston? No. There's some perks (garage to park my motorcycle and a room for my office) but that's about it. Oh, and things are just easy here. No traffic, the DMV's 'bad' waits are 30 minutes, not 4 hours. That type of thing.

Meeting cool people happens much less frequently here, and the culture (even around OSU) is simply as not as academically focuses as hanging around Cambridge.

Purchasing power way up. Quality of life? A draw at best, probably a loss. If I had my way, I'd be back in Boston tomorrow.

Purchasing power way up. Quality of life? A draw at best, probably a loss. If I had my way, I'd be back in Boston tomorrow.

Just taking a rude guess here (sorry if I'm wrong) but it sounds like you might be making a sacrifice for your family or partner? If so, you need to factor in how much they mean to you into your quality of life score for Columbus vs living alone in Boston. (I'm not judging you - a lot of us are in a similar situation!)

Yep. Girlfriend working on her PhD at OSU. It's a difficult debate. In the long term its probably shooting my career in the foot being here, and the big-fish, small-pond thing hasn't proven to be useful at all. The problem is that the pond here is filled with even fewer interesting consumer facing web 2.0 companies than Boston. Programming for insurance and medical companies might pay the bills, but it surely isn't sexy.

"If you have a family and need a bigger place you can always live in New Jersey."

Right that makes sense, because top talent would like to live in a craphole just so they can have the privilege of taking a massive salary cut.

Excellent question. The parochial mentality that workers must be colocated is clearly part of the problem.

However, using remote workers is not the only solution. As a remote worker, I can tell you that I have to expend more effort communicating than I would if I was co-lo'd. Granted, I'm an extrovert so I don't mind terribly.

For more on this, see: http://evan.tiggerpalace.com/articles/2010/12/10/rule-0-choo...

Instead of importing an entire team to NYC, why don't they export a team leader to Omaha or Tupelo for the duration of the project, or at least until they feel the team is groking the gist of the project.

Such a scenario would imply that there's a higher number of capable programmers willing to receive a given wage within commuting distance of those places than there is in New York. I don't think that's the case.

Cost of living between Omaha and Jersey City, NJ is not nearly as bad. Just because you work in NYC doesn't mean you can't live 15 min away. (Queens and Brooklyn are similar priced, if you work on the east side.)

http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=50000&city1=531370...

Also, your data on Indeed is a significant undercount of the higher paid programming jobs. If you are looking for a good programmer, you will pay $150k and you won't bother posting it on Indeed or Monster.

This.

All these bloody people play armchair economists with macroecon, which is genuinely difficult, but refuse to do the same with micro:

If you can't hire people at a given wage, raise the wage. Or whine online about the lack of employees.

But if you whine loud enough, you can open more visas for cheap labor to come in next year.

I'm totally not against people coming in to the country - legally. One of my first tech jobs was at a company that sponsored a number of Polish and Czech engineers. They were all effectively captive - they were paid a barely livable wage (relative to US-born people doing the same job) but couldn't easily go out and take another job due to immigration status. But that meant the company 'saved' so much, and could use it to help keep other wages in line - 'you're already paid $x more than person Y!' sort of thing.

Ah yes, the "visa discount". The legal part of our immigration regime is exploitative, humiliating, and such a great deal for employers that I don't see it changing any time soon.

"If you can't hire people at a given wage, raise the wage. Or whine online about the lack of employees."

Or move your operations closer to the less expensive areas of the country (there's 48 other states besides CA and NY!).

Some industries are lauded for moving entires factories overseas and making a killing on wage arbitrage. But somehow 'the money' likes to keep 'blessed' startup activity within 10 minutes drive from all VC offices, and this is seen as 'the way things have to be'.

Factories are nothing like software development: factories are repetitive assembly lines and software development is a creative process.

When talent concentrates like it does in SF and NY, it creates a culture that becomes more valuable than the sum of it's parts. You've got people who are constantly meeting and exchanging ideas, often by coincidence or near accident. This doesn't happen when in areas without enough talent density to create a concentration. The same pattern is repeated in many forms of art and business.

Except there's obviously not enough talent density in areas where companies claim they can't hire anyone. Or there is and no one wants to work at those companies because the pay is too low, or conditions are abysmal.

> If you can't hire people at a given wage, raise the wage. Or whine online about the lack of employees.

THANK YOU.

They simply aren't paying enough.

If they pay the same as everyone else, they don't stand out. And they require MORE work than other jobs with the same salary.

If the absolute level of remuneration isn't high enough, people with the necessary skills will just do their OWN startup.

They have to pay enough that the surety of the wage OUTWEIGHS the possibility of striking it rich, for people who could do their own startups.

This is pretty easy to see -- take the founders, and ask them if they'd switch to someone else's company for what they are offering new employees.

Or, ask them if they'd switch their OWN compensation package with whoever it is they are trying to hire.

No, THEY won't work for that little, even on their own baby. So why would anyone else?

Average wage = Average worker

It basically comes down to greed. If they MUST have rock star ninjas, but they REFUSE to pay for it, they aren't serious about succeeding.

If they CAN'T pay for it, then they need to raise money so that they can. If they can't raise money, they aren't any more stable than anyone else's random startup. Why bother working for them at all?

Better to combine salaries to get ONE expert than two or three or four middling employees.

Really the problem is there's too much glorification of FOUNDERS. We see time and time again that they don't have the skills needed to do whatever it is the company is supposed to do, so it's usually the early employees who do it. People think it's their god-given right as a "Founder" with a capital "F" to be king of the hill and get the lion's share of everything, and command an army of peons (who actually do the vast majority of the work) who are obligated to fulfill the "F"ounder's aspirations.

ViaWeb started with the people they needed. It's a lot easier to hire for the non-critical positions.