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Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

My own personal data point is that, with COVID, some tech companies are embracing remote work and suddenly I can enter a much wider and higher paid job market without having to relocate.

Companies that aim to get butts back in the office are going to have a huge brain drain.

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One slight variation on remote: last year we learned which companies are loyal to, and value, employees. Plenty of companies released people preemptively, simply to make a couple of quarters look good.

If the relationship is going to be that minimally frangible, people will hesitate to relocate to a company town at great impact to their family, only to repeat every time a shadow crosses some book.

Remote people can have some defensive stability.

> If the relationship is going to be that minimally frangible, people will hesitate to relocate to a company town at great impact to their family, only to repeat every time a shadow crosses some book.

Most tech jobs are not in single-company towns, they are in tech hubs, which have a large number of alternative employers.

There are large companies in small towns with need for tech workers. If you move to Columbus, Georgia to work for Aflac's IT department (which is quite large) and then lose that job, you're going to have a difficult time finding something equivalent nearby. There are other local employers with IT needs but nothing on the scale of Aflac. At that point, you probably have to pick up your family and move closer to Atlanta to find similar work and compensation.

That is correct, and it is correct that remote people have a moat against this sort of mercenary behaviour by their employers.

This moat is a lot less relevant if you are relocating to an industry hub, though. If you are having a hard time getting a new job in Seattle, San Francisco, or NYC, it's probably because the entire industry is contracting, and remote won't save you.

Is this technically true? Is there data on this? Just speaking for myself as a resident of Ohio, there are plenty of tech jobs between Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Cleveland. Not as many as in the tech hubs, but there are forty-seven states that aren't California, New York, or Washington.

I imagine it also depend a lot on what you want to do. If you're equally happy working on whatever as long as you get to code then there are lots of jobs available all over the country/world. If you have a specific niche or specialty and want to stay within your sub field, or you want to work in a job lets you be more research focused, then being in the right hub is much more vital.

There are, indeed, forty-seven states that aren't California, New York, or Washington, but California's economy alone is bigger than the economies of the 25 smallest states (plus DC) combined.

The opposite effect could be in play here too: remote employees feel less connected to their team and are more willing to quit.

Anecdotally, I've seen 4 people leave for career advancement versus 1 that left due to wanting to be in the office.

Theres a peer pressure factor.

While i was personally relieved to be back in office. I have also seen a few colleagues able to jump to more lucrative deals without uprooting their lives, which i find a bit intriguing. Im happy where I am at, but I have done a lot of good work (basically recycled our entire infra and migrated to a WFH culture) and havent seen a raise in 3-4 years..

So it has me thinking of putting feelers out when i otherwise probably wouldnt. Doesnt help that I was snubbed for a role that I was ASKED to apply for by one of the hiring comittee members and didnt even get an interview internally. So I know where I stand.

If you’re not getting a cost of living raise each year, you’re effectively being paid less … as you become more experienced.

Oh yeah completely agree. And its frustrating. I built a team from a group that had seem near 100% turnover over the previous 3 years. I have gotten at least 1-2 of them promotions.

I transitioned them to more of a "devops" style roles, pushing hard on Automation, documentation, removing silos and cut a lot of their big time suck things like refreshing non-prod environments down from 1 week to around 45 minutes. Even in the lead up to the pandemic, we saw a WFH demand coming, recognized we lacked the VPN capacity to do so and used FOSS tools to spin up mutliple new VPNs to handle a couple different security boundaries in a matter of hours to allow many to work from home.

We have rebuilt a lot of the "bones" of our infrastructure from day 1, mostly in our virtualization stack and DB's etc. And most of my team had gained some trust in my decision making. Externally we generally get really solid remarks in our ability to support staff/products and our resposniveness.

On the one hand I kind of know why i was snubbed for the job. Im younger (in my 30's) and it was a higher level role. And i have spent the core of my early career moving every 3-4 years as trends change to allow me to rebuild new things rather than "tending sheep" which im sure some saw as more a flight risk in a position where the previous holder was there for 30 years. It also came at a cost as I floated from more virtualization/storage roles to networking and then security centric leaving me more of a "master of none" in the eyes of many.

That notion is a large part of what has kept me here. Im relatively happy and i do feel I probably need to have a few more years of "stability" under my belt. But at what cost. I dont live in a tech center like the bay area, nor do i have any desire to. But that brings its own cultural differences.

The pandemic seems to have changed much of that. I would now be able to stay where I'm happy, in a relatively small town that lacks a "major" tech sector but possibly see a larger bump in compensation and get some more challenging or fulfilling roles offered. My current company, including my boss, seems to think I am here for the long term...I just am not so sure myself.

Again this is totally anecdotal, but I can totally see why others would be thinking the same way.

Feeling disconnected from the team because you're all remote doesn't necessarily mean you want to be in the office.

I think it's more like... you aren't as loyal to the team and company and so make career moves for personal or professional reasons that you might have delayed otherwise.

Heh this is actually a pretty good thing.

The fact that I hadn't seen my coworkers in a year made it easier to switch. No denying that. Loved my previous workplace, great people, great work. They went above and beyond in all matters. Would probably not have risked a move in normal circumstances.

Just a personal anecdote, I feel way closer to my current coworkers (who I've only met in person twice) than at my first job where I simply didn't have much in common with any of my coworkers. If you really click then you can get along online, but if you work with someone in-person, there's no escape if you don't like them.

Tech has the additional factor of companies using their billions of dollars sitting around unproductively to entrap their companies.

Some of the cloud companies acquire talent to keep their customers trapped. I have colleagues who are system administrators and are getting $500k comp as individual contributors, way in excess of their value. One bank junior vp type guy got a 3x pay increase, because he knew where the bodies were buried for a major cloud implementation.

I would go insane if I had to stay home all day everyday.

I don't advocate for full office neither, a hybrid model like 3 days home 2 days office, or whatever combination of this I think is the way to go.

Also, a lot of people forget that the World is not comprised of just office workers. There are jobs that simply can't be done from home.

Google just bought a pretty expensive office though..

I read it as "huge butt drain" since you talked a about butts in chairs. :)

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