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Comment by EMM_386 | Hacker News Reader

I've worked remotely for over 8 years as a senior software engineer, and I'm not going back anytime soon.

This will get interesting for both salaries and global movement.

Being a digital nomad certainly won't be as "hip" when everyone else can do the same thing. And now people are going to be competing with a lot of low-cost employees with equal skills.

This has already been the issue with offshoring, but now you can hire someone in Fargo, SD instead of San Fran, CA and pay them going market rate. For the same skills.

In the long-term, this might get people out of packed cities and horrific commutes and help become a rebirth of small-town America (or small-town Chile and everywhere else).

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>In the long-term, this might get people out of packed cities and horrific commutes and help become a rebirth of small-town America (or small-town Chile and everywhere else).

Perhaps. I think the shift will be to more healthy-livable cities, whether thats big or small.

Vast majority of humans seem love the benefits of high population density more than they dislike the costs, remote work or not.

> Vast majority of humans seem love the benefits of high population density more than they dislike the costs, remote work or not.

Over these 8 years I've lived everywhere from NYC to small town America and other countries in AirBnbs.

They each have their benefits, they are just different.

If you have a family, small towns can be amazing. Good school districts, tight-nit communities, great charitable events to participate in. Of course you can find that in NYC but it's a completely different scenario and vibe.

It comes down to what works for the individual, which is perfect and exactly where we need to be moving to.

> If you have a family, small towns can be amazing. Good school districts

Your definition of "small town" must be different than mine, or small towns in your area are a hell of a lot nicer than ours. Or maybe you mean suburban/exurban towns? Those are the only "small towns" with good public schools, around here. Cities (as in, actually in the city proper)? Bad schools. Rural small towns? Bad schools. Smallish cities? Bad schools. There's a belt of good schools in (some of!) the suburban and exurban towns around the major cities, and that's it. Few or none of those towns have the other characteristics you mention, because they're basically bedroom communities for the city they're attached to, with some lame chain retail and fast-food and you go to the city for anything that's actually worth doing.

Agree. More people should try out different living contexts to find which tradeoff matrix works best for them.

I'm now in Vancouver BC, quite a high population density, yet I find it's super easy to remain healthy & happy (air quality, access to nature, safety etc.).

Vancouver BC is quite an outlier in those qualities, which is reflected in its land prices.

That's for sure. The urban planning here really turned out well.

I've always dreamed of packing up and moving to the mountains (the Whites, or the Rockies, or the Sierras) but I've always been held back by 3 major factors. First, most rural communities don't have very good educational infrastructure. Second, moving somewhere with no social scene as an adult means you'll be spending a long time with no or few friends. Third, the cost and time sink of traveling back home to visit family for holidays, baptisms, etc.

Nit: I think you meant Fargo, ND rather than Fargo, SD.

For local market rate, [1] seems to match anecdata with new grads being 50-70k. MSFT is largely responsible for anything above that.

[1] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/software-en...

You can’t really just compare average salaries in different metros, because there’s major selection bias. The average engineer in South Dakota is not the same as one in San Francisco. Less talented workers tend to heavily flow towards low COL markets, because they’re less to achieve a high enough productivity differential to justify the high cost.

This obviously isn’t true for every single case. But the typical engineer at a sleepy regional bank is nowhere near talented enough to make it at a fast-paced, hyper-growth venture backed startup.

Having worked in everything from backend systems for sleepy banks to hedge funds to the hottest pre-IPO valley darlings, anecdotally you are dead wrong.

If there is any correlation at all it’s that the venture backed startups have a lower than average skill level.

It is amazing that these lower than average skill level people make companies that earn the highest profits, and have the highest wages.

Is that surprising? You can cook up an electron app after a few tutorials and two weeks time. All you have to do is sell a product, the product can be junk if you can convince your buyers otherwise. Charisma gets more funding than technical expertise, because consumers buy on charisma.

Consumers are not buying iPhones because of charisma. They are not using Gmail because of charisma.

Some VC pump and dump companies get by and make some headlines by being a fad electron app, but I am referring to those that stick around for years and develop products that require R&D. I have a hard time believing that people who work at companies that have transformed the way we live over the past few decades are "lower than average skill".

So, I wasn’t thinking Apple or Google when I wrote this because those are giant companies that hire globally. Most of Apples profit comes from products produced far from the valley. That said, I’ve worked with lots of veterans of Apple and Google and there quite literally is no correlation between having worked at those companies and being good. I believe that the current hiring environment in software is so broken that being hired by someone is effectively arbitrary.

Similarly Microsoft and Amazon are not valley creations but are giant profitable companies that hire tech workers from a wide variety of regions.

When you hire as much of the industry as those companies do its not at all surprising that the talent in them runs the gamut. They represent so much of the industry it would be near impossible not to have a big distribution of talent within them.

But when you get into the rest of the ecosystem is when it gets pretty ugly pretty fast. So far as I can see the biggest correlative factor with engineers in the valley is a capacity to move there. That filter does not trend towards being good at the job. And I’ll stand by my anecdotal opinion.

I think the more amazing thing that some firms are able to overcome this talent problem is that it took a global pandemic for the opinion it being an issue to change.

I would say my claim is that offering more money or the chance to make more money does make it possible to end up with a workforce of people with a higher than average skill level.

And if certain geographical locations are known for being places where the chances of making a lot more money are significantly higher, then I would say the skill level of people there is probably higher on average. The proof would be the numerous leading companies and products coming out of these places.

Of course, those locations can change, and maybe widespread access to broadband will cause that to change that or reduce benefits of agglomeration. But it remains to be seen.

That presumes a) that hiring good developers is a driver for that success b) the valley offers more money relatively c) there is actual proof that those firms are producing outsized returns.

I for one have made more money in finance than valley style tech. That may change one day but there _also_ was no correlation in the finance firms for quality.

c) is pretty clear based on 10-Ks and performance of tech companies relative to others in the market.

And while I personally do not know people’s financial histories, I can say that the part of my college class that went to tech seem to work far less than the part that went to finance. Even if gross income is similar, I doubt that $/hour worked, or the risk was better in finance than in tech over the past 15 to 20 years.

That isn’t to knock finance, it’s just my interpretation of the reality of how much access to broadband and advancements in certain technologies have underlined much of our economic growth.

Apple and google are not the vc backed startup companies the other commenter was talking about, though.

What's amazing about it? Perhaps they are trying a lot harder.

Surely effort is a very big part of success, but I would attribute at least some of the magic that makes the tech companies hum to above average technical expertise.

> The average engineer in South Dakota is not the same as one in San Francisco.

How do you know? I've worked with extremely talented engineers from all over the globe at this point, 20+ years in. Do you think all the engineers in San Francisco were born there?

You would never guess where I'm living, and it's not San Francisco. I'd love to, but I'm waiting for tech to recede a bit and a sense of normalcy to return.

I think that time zone bands will temper this somewhat. It’s a lot easier to work with people on the same schedule than trying coordinate with people/teams that are +/- 3 time zones away.

It's actually not that bad. Regular meetings between global teams can be scheduled as any others are. People working internationally with people in the U.S. are already used to taking evening conference calls around convenient U.S. based meeting times. For east and west coast teams, in my experience they usually just adopt east coast hours, which the west coast people prefer because this means they avoid traffic entirely.

I agree.

I'm currently managing a team of offshore developers +11 from me on top of being the lead developer.

It's chaotic but members of the team adjust their schedule to partially overlap so it works, for the most part.

But I agree. We are a US company and we originally looked at South American companies to try to keep people around the same timezone. I was not involved in the final decision, which apparently came down strictly to financials.

3 time zones is a pain, and 4+ is a nightmare. I can definitely see a lot of people telecommuting from "nearby" (Vermont to NYC for example) but Hanoi to San Francisco is just too much.

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