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Comment by pmiller2 | Hacker News Reader

Bingo! I often talk about how you can rent a 3BR apartment in my home town (Nowhere, Michigan) for like $900. This is true -- I've verified it recently. The drawback is that you have to live in my home town.

I can certainly see companies wanting to pay less based on CoL simply to make the bottom line better. Given the way capitalism works, I'd say this is a near inevitability. The end result will probably be that the big tech companies are going to start "offshoring" work to the Midwest, and other low to very low cost of living areas. ("We'll pay you $70k per year, but you can live wherever you want in the US!")

I can't see this being good for employees, because there are significant benefits to living in a place like NYC or the Bay Area, and those benefits would be lost if people had to live in the middle of nowhere to make it worthwhile.

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> I can't see this being good for employees...

... that want to live in NYC or SF. For everyone else, who doesn't want to live in places like that, this is awesome. (And that's a word I never use)

Is it awesome? It raises the cost of everything everywhere else (because for the majority of young, educated people there aren't _that_ many desirable cities). We are already seeing that in places like Austin or Colorado.

There aren't enough people employed in tech for their escape from SF to raise cost of living meaningfully across the globe. There are enough places to live in (with no shortage of real estate), so bring it on.

And I think there'll be more desirable cities to live in in the future if remote work becomes the norm across fields where it is possible. People will start to liven up locations that nobody would otherwise look at as long as the jobs aren't there.

Do you know why there are enough places to live? Because nobody wants to live there. That's why you can buy a 4BR house in Allamakee County for $115k: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/304-Highwa...

And, yes, maybe there are not enough software developers in SF, NYC, Austin, and other tech hubs to drive up prices, but this move will certainly drive down compensation. I have a hard time believing such a move would end up being good for workers.

"Desirable cities" for me, as a 30-year-old software engineer, include Brevard, North Carolina and Dahlonega, Georgia. Notably, that list does not include New York City, Los Angeles, and definitely doesn't include San Francisco (I'd quit a job if it required me to move there, without a second thought).

"Desirable" is a multivariate subjective assessment, not an objective trait (or even a mostly-consensus one).

One of the best DBAs I've had the pleasure of working with would, from what I've gathered, prefer to be in a boat on a lake somewhere in rural Alabama than to be in many of the major "tech hub cities". Being a software engineer doesn't mean you have the same opinions as other software engineers (as a quick search of programming language trends might show, at least on a superficial level).

If the scenario you're describing happens, some startups will appear and pay SWEs 160k/year to live wherever they want, and the good engineers will leave to work at those startups.

The fundamental problem (for the cost-cutting employer) is that good engineering orgs really do generate that much value.

This happened with the wage-collusion attempts in the valley. Facebook was willing to give more raises than Google or Apple. In the latest roll of the dice, AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, and friensd were willing to pay more. It's the cycle of business.

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