As someone who works remotely and who posts remote-friendly openings for his team in the Who's Hiring HN thread, it's kind of amazing to me that more people aren't actively looking to get out.
I live and work in a small midwestern town because my wife's military job has us here. If I was single, however, I would make the most of my remoteness and try working from a variety of towns. Here's some places that I would try if I was a young remote worker:
- A small Colorado/Utah/Montana ski town. Some place like Telluride, where I could ski/hike/bike in the mornings
- A fun desert town with great recreation like Moab, UT...Prescott, AZ...Bend, OR...
- A beach town in S. Florida during the winter
- Costa Rica, Panama, Bay Islands of Honduras in the wintertime
- Thailand
- South coast of Texas in the Winter, Texas Hill Country in the fall
Do you have a job board with these postings? I'd be quite interested in researching something like that. Recently was trying to do that with the company I worked for and they were a little timid to do it I also had another offer I wanted them to match so I think the combo made them timid to counter.
I did this for five years in Panama. Weather was nice. Met my wife there. Learned Spanish. There's no income tax there if your money comes from out of the country. As long as you're not from the US, that's amazing. For Americans I think you still have to pay tax over 100,000 income. Remote salaries don't go much above that anyway though. Paid off my mortgage by 31. Not too bad for a college dropout.
I can't speak for other companies but we make salary offers based on the candidate's experience and role, not their location.
However, the job security is an interesting point. I suspect that Zapier gains huge leverage over it's relocated employees because they're now dependent on their Zapier job, another hard-to-find remote gig elsewhere, or funding their own move back to a tech hub. I don't know what Zapier's pay bands are like but I'll bet their employee churn is lower than industry average.
Yes, and that is an unhealthy way to manage churn in most cases. Perhaps Zapier is different but I'm skeptical. I think it's more likely that a higher than typical fraction of their workers are dissatisfied but locked in for reasons you note.
As for wages, the concept of "cost of living adjustment" is just a way for owners to keep more of the profits at the expense of employees. If web/mobile app shop X in the Bay can pay $120k for a freshly minted BS grad, they can pay that for a remote dev living in Milwaukee or eastern Europe, and it's very likely a company based in Milwaukee could do the same. They don't because of the leverage, though.
I worked remotely in Vietnam for about a year. It was pretty great. Fun and super cheap. I wasn't in a big city so I could literally pay my monthly rent with one hour of work.
I worked on site in San Jose for a time and also remotely in the US while my office was there. Internet is a real, real issue in a lot of Central American and other "nice" foreign places to visit that aren't fully developed. Became a real problem for me as a remote worker.
I work remote and I've worked from a few of these places. Panama is ok. Costa Rica and the Bay Islands of Honduras both have HORRIBLE internet. Thailand is hell if you need to work the same time zone as people in the US.
"was if you're in the Bay Area and you take a job with
Zapier we'll pay $10,000 to help you relocate to
anywhere, or as we call it, de-locate."
..so this is just a one time re-location "bonus"? I think many large companies "pay you" something close to this amount to re-locate to the bay area. This really doesn't help that much. What would be better is to pay bay area salaries/rates in another part of the country that doesn't have stupid expensive housing rates + 10k/yearly for not working in the bay area.
Many/most companies pay something like this for relocation. I never thought of it as a bonus, rather a way for an employer to offset the expense and misery of moving. If a company didn't help pay for relocation, I wouldn't want to work for that company. It's not a bonus, it's an expectation.
Don't get me wrong, it would be a lot of fun to work with world class engineers, it's probably a blast, but life is too short to work for unethical organizations run by egomaniacs.
Everyone I talk to there is practically contemplating suicide (their words) before their RSUs vest. Trying to add some process just doesn't go over well, apparently!
Yes it is separate. At Amazon the signing bonus you owe if you leave within one year but the relocation bonus you owe if you leave within two; both are prorated
They are probably a bit below Google or Facebook salaries, but compared to an average SF startup, they pay literally 50-100% more. (the offer I just got from them was 80% more than my SF startup salary).
Some of their behavior is indeed "annoying" ie they have a weird stock options vesting schedule, but if you actually do the math, and think with your head, you see that their total compensation is quite competitive.
The moral of the story is, if you care about compensation, don't work for startups. Even the "less competitive" companies like Amazon, with "scummy" behavior like claw backs, are still miles ahead of the average startup, in terms of compensation.
I've seem most BigCo offers to be a bit lower salary than startup offers (at senior or staff level engineer, excluding Netflix) but total comp is indeed much higher.
The alternative would be to have a "guaranteed" bonus after a certain amount of time, but people overwhelmingly prefer having something now, even if it means they might lose it later.
I've had similar repayment terms on every signing bonus I've gotten.
Especially at large public companies, a huge chunk of your comp is either a bonus at year end or stock on a vesting schedule with a 1 year cliff. When switching companies, it's fairly common to get a sizeable signing bonus to compensate for the reduced cashflow for the first 12 months.
Ok, so I "delocate". Do I then have to take a pay cut because I'm now somewhere else?
Spreading the tech sector out around the country even more is great, and things like this can be a step in the right direction. But a big part of why the Bay Area is what it is has to do with funding. Most VCs are there, and don't seem to be willing to move away. Hell, YC requires you to be there, at least during your time with them. And the concentration of tech talent means that it's always easy to find a new job, or even to start your own company.
> And the concentration of tech talent means that it's always easy to find a new job, or even to start your own company.
I've never been there, but I see this echoed a lot. Is it actually true? I'm interested in both, but I'm wary of the exaggeration that may be "it's easy".
Starting a company is always unbelievably difficult, but the Bay Area's density makes things a little easier.
I used to live in an apartment on 55 9th St, San Francisco. The guy in the apartment across the hall also started a company at the same time as me. He introduced me to other founder friends in the apartment building.
The lobby has a coffee shop where I've made other founder, angel, and VC friends.
And I haven't even started enumerating all my other startup-y friends I made outside of my own apartment lobby.
I got very lucky, and your own mileage may vary, but if you're looking for helpful startup-y people, the Bay Area is still the world capital.
Three people I know have made (very early, very tentative) investment offers. A former VPE has offered to be an advisor, and has introduced me to a really good salesperson.
That sort of thing is really limited to places where people understand saas businesses, have the appropriate risk appetite, and have previously earned enough disposable cash to take real risks.
Another aspect is simply institutionalizing the idea that starting a business may not be stupid. This helps when you're trying to talk SOs onboard into taking huge pay cuts.
>but I'm wary of the exaggeration that may be "it's easy".
It really is. It's why I cant bring myself to leave this place even with all it's warts. Knowing that you can just screw off and do whatever you want for a year then have a dozen interviews lined up for six figure jobs with nothing more than a few emails is really empowering, actually. I can't imagine the anxiety of living somewhere else and being dependent on a single good job no matter what the relocation bonus is.
> Knowing that you can just screw off and do whatever you want for a year then have a dozen interviews lined up for six figure jobs with nothing more than a few emails is really empowering, actually.
Unless you're a front end engineer. Then you'd be behind about 4 frameworks, 2 build systems, and 3 transpiled languages. Might as well be a fortran programmer at that point.
I'm in Sydney. While not compatible to SF I do feel I can leave a job after a year and grab another one quick. I'm about to start a new job. It took 2 weeks of looking to land a good one.
In fairness, there are plenty of other places in the country with good tech scenes where you wouldn't face this anxiety. None of them quite like the bay, but it's not as though you have to relocate to Flint MI or someplace with zero other prospects. The CO front range, NY, SLC, ATL, and so on all have healthy tech economies, and more places keep cropping up.
Yes, if you are a developer. Work is very easy to come by, though the vast majority is nowhere near as innovative or exciting as it once was here.
I can't help thinking that this move by Zapier is a way to reduce turnover. I have several friends who smugly relocated away from the bay area, who now hate their jobs and can't leave them because there are no local opportunities.
Working remotely may be different, but the problems of networking and finding new work still apply.
And interview, how? And find it, how? Who will recommend them? You're asking why they don't just eat cake.
These things aren't impossible, just so much harder that my friends (One in Idaho, one in Kansas) haven't been able to manage it, and not for lack of trying.
It has been hard to watch them floundering and begging for help I don't have to give.
I don't mean to minimize your friends' difficulties, but these are solvable problems. I am also not the person to whom you are replying.
Don't include a mailing address on the resume. If you can past the resume screen, the company may be more amenable to a non-local candidate.
Most of Idaho is fairly close to Portland, OR and Seattle, WA. Paying for non-local candidate's flights, meals, and hotels is fairly standard. Kansas is a bit more difficult obviously since it is farther.
Did they lose their whole network when they moved away from the Bay Area? Or did they never live/work in the Bay Area in the first place? It is still possible to leverage one's extended network for opportunities.
It's complicated. I wrote a paragraph or so about it and deleted it, thinking the reasons were either obvious or too specific to their situations. Over five years, I guess they've lost what network they have from when they lived here - I definitely hear and see them less and less, and for the last few years it's really just been about seeing if I have any leads for them :|
I don't think they are being dinged explicitly for their location, but they aren't getting the attention that I do. There are reasons enough for that, that don't involve prejudiced recruiters, though I do think they are being judged as second tier due to their current employment, and their employers location. Their employers are definitely down market. Moreover, their skillset has certainly atrophied over they left. So much so that I can no longer send jobs their way - there isn't a fit. Things are starting to look a little Willie Loman-esque.
Is all of this because they moved out of the valley? They would probably have similar struggles here, but they would also have recruiters banging down their door.
> And interview, how? And find it, how? Who will recommend them?
I got a job in New York, while living in Dallas.
Interview: by flying in on an airplane, staying in a cheap hotel, and lining up a few interviews a day for a few days.
Finding it: There's not a shortage of job sites, or recruiters breaking down your inbox.
Recommendations: your former coworkers and friends won't assume you get lead poisoning in the rust belt; they can still recommend you to others, and jobs to you.
I just recently moved from Dallas to New York, and it was only after years of frustration and being ignored by almost everyone outside of Texas not named Amazon (and most companies in Texas that weren't in Dallas). I didn't have recruiters breaking down my inbox. My submissions on job sites seemed to be going in to black holes. If I got multiple interviews in a month I considered myself lucky. I didn't have any former co-workers outside of DFW to call on, and very few inside it.
I'm willing to accept that I'm unusual, but people in this thread are making it sound like I'm a unicorn. I think this industry has serious geographic myopia, and that it is one of the reasons the "talent shortage" is more severe than it needs to be.
Yea, that's why I live in the Bay Area. Not because I'm so in love with it but because if I move to Flyover, Arkansas, and end up losing/hating the job, where the hell am I going to go? That's right--moving again!
A friend of mine got an offer from a startup in Palo Alto that he wanted to negotiate. He literally walked across the street to another interview and had a counter offer when he met with the founder of the first company the next day.
I've done this in San Diego, and it wasn't even in the city. I didn't even cross a street, just half of a small parking lot. It's totally possible in other places.
Easy is relative. I have my linked in profile as private as I can make it, and I still get 1-2 recruiters messaging me every week. When I lived outside the Bay I might have got 10 or so over the course of a year.
Honestly, the answer will really vary depending on who you talk to. That said, if you have worked hard and built a network in the area, those things are actually true. Even around 2001/2002 as well as 2008/2009 there were always jobs around if you knew where to go look. Similarly, if one has established a reputation for themselves (one doesn't need to be a public figure though), it makes it easier to get something off the ground.
Yes. I know this is just one person's experience, but I've been continuously employed since 1998 except for a 4 week gap after losing my job in 2002. This is at 8 different companies. 10 if you count name changes due to the way one startup was bought and sold.
If I wanted a job in Boston by Wednesday, I'd probably be able to find one, maybe two. Here the only question would be how many people I had time to talk to between now and then.
If you have a desirable resume, skills to back it up and maybe a connection or two, it is beyond trivial to get a job here. It is still challenging to break into, but once you're in, I don't know anyone who is unemployed except by choice and even those people who want to be unemployed get unsolicited job offers.
I wouldn't know about starting your own company, but getting a job right now is absolutely as easy as people make it out to be. Finding a job you want might be a different story, of course.
Maybe you can get a job in a couple of weeks if you're not picky, but if you actually don't want one of the many "dog" jobs in tech, you're going to be searching for much longer than that. I think this idea that great tech jobs are growing on trees out here is largely a myth.
Just go to AngelList and you can find a ton of startup companies and a decent amount of those that are interesting and offer various levels of pay, interesting work, and life balance. It's not overly hard to find a match though it could take a couple months if you're not "senior" level in your career.
Does that mean that location is not taken into account for salaries, or does it mean that if I start in Croatia I get $30k, but if an American starts in the Bay Area and relocates to Croatia, he'll get $120k plus a $10k bonus while I'm still getting $30k?
I think part of the challenge becomes if the startup gets into a situation where it needs to get acquired/acqui-hired by Google/Facebook/Apple/Cisco/Salesforce/Oracle/Uber. Will potential acquirers want to entertain having all the acquir-hired talent remote and not onsite to be integrated/indoctrinated?
He (and Sam Altman for all YC companies) should have the startup(s) all de-locate to the same town that's within driving distance of the Silicon Valley.
I bet you could convince a lot of tech people to move to Santa Cruz or Monterey. You could also recruit from UC Santa Cruz and Cal Poly. Both downtown Santa Cruz and downtown Monterey feel pretty small town urban-y.
Plus the Silicon Valley VC's can play golf at Pebble Beach or Half Moon Bay Ritz Carlton and make a weekend getaway out of it AND get a business trip tax write-off for mileage and hotel says.
And maybe before descending on the town you can get the city council and a developer to agree to build high density housing in the downtown core.
I lived in Menlo Park for 8 years with my family. When I moved there the startup I went to work for was a 5 minute walk from my house. My current startup is also in Menlo. A year ago my wife and wanted a larger place. We looked in Menlo and PA. $3M for a teardown / needs tons of work. After thinking about it we started to look outside of the area. School district was a key factor of course. We ending up going as far up the mountain from Los Gatos as we could and still be in the school district. $1.3M+500K remodel. Half of my companies employees are remote. We use G-apps with Meeting and Slack. It works well. I drive into the office 2 days a week timing the drive to be outside of traffic hows. 50KM drive outside of traffic is 30 minutes, with traffic is 1.5 hours. I have friends that moved to Morgan Hill, Gilroy and take the CalTrain in. We other developers relocate out of state because of the cost of living. The cost of housing in the main areas is stupid, even if you can afford it. Menlo and PA are doing NOTHING to support the high density housing required to make things better.
I agree there is something unique about being able to have everyone around you in the same line of business (tech) and it is great for making contacts, etc. However the cost are really starting to outweigh the benefits.
The bay area needs to look to places like Tokyo as an example of how to build out from the trains to the housing.
Been meaning to checkout Morgan Hill. I hear downtown Morgan Hill is pretty happening these days.
I also noticed that there is a self-driving car company down there:
http://velodynelidar.com
Are there any other interesting tech companies down there?
Nice thing is that if you live near downtown you could take the Caltrain up to downtown MTV or PA.
Morgan Hill / Gilroy area is fantastic - small town feel, slower pace of life, diverse population, significant rural element, growing dining/entertainment options.
Housing is certainly less expensive than the peninsula but by no means cheap compared to the rest of the state/country. I would still plan on spending $1 million plus but you will get a big new single family home instead of a 50 year old 1200 sf beater.
The downside is, of course, the commute. There are some alternate transportation options, e.g. Caltrain, some companies like Apple run buses down to Morgan Hill, but this will limit the geographic area that you can reasonably commute to. IMHO San Jose, Santa Clara, & Cupertino are doable, Sunnyvale & Mountain View are pushing it, and Palo Alto is too far. There are a few companies in South Santa Clara county (and hopefully this will dramatically increase over time) but you'd still probably be commuting north.
Looks to be about 35 minutes to downtown San Jose via Caltrain. That's do-able. The younger employees could live downtown in San Jose and the employees with kids could live in Morgan Hill.
If YCombinator (and Zapier) were to move from Mountain View to Downtown San Jose that'd be a huge symbolic move for San Jose.
> I agree there is something unique about being able to have everyone around you in the same line of business (tech) and it is great for making contacts, etc. However the cost are really starting to outweigh the benefits.
There is also a cost to having everyone around you in the same line of business, both in terms of correlated economic risk, and also in terms of loss of perspective.
I feel the same way. Maybe this just points to an ambivalence on my part about my career, but when I hear about the density of tech workers in the Bay Area, it makes me feel claustrophobic.
Santa Cruz and Monterey are barely cheaper, and they have very little extra housing available. If you want to actually save any money you'll have to head inland toward the Central Valley.
Reno seems like a good option, not counting quality-of-life (I've never been there, so couldn't say). Housing is actually reasonably priced, it's in Nevada with no state income tax, and it's a 4 hour drive or a pretty cheap bus ride to get back to SF.
I know a few folks who work remotely with SF companies that live in Reno. They'll make the trek occasionally to come into the office, too.
Reno is pretty sweet, pretty decent outdoor activities. Up and coming downtown too. Plus your friends who stay in the Bay Area can visit you on the weekend during the ski season.
I remember when I was in semiconductor sales engineer I visited International Gaming Technology out there (video game slot machines). It was surprisingly not very desert like at all in the spring. The fields were covered in green grass.
So by giving them a $10k carrot they can basically lock them in to the company because it would be much more difficult to interview for competitors or even start startups. That's pretty genius.
I think there's a collective realization happening in the Bay Area that the landlords are the real winners and everyone else is just playing their game. Employees hate seeing 3k/month fly out the door in rent just as much as CEOs hate paying it, just as much as investors hate seeing their capital ultimately end up with landlords.
Big companies in general are conservative. They've made it and don't want to take unnecessary risks. Trying to introduce remote culture into a company that isn't used to it/tooled for it is a HUGE risk.
The innovation in hiring is going to come from small companies who need to hire but can't afford Bay Area salaries. Mid-career folks here, not even particularly good ones, are routinely looking at 200k or more out the door from their employers. 400k seed rounds, hell even 800k seed rounds, don't go very far on that kind of money. So what has to happen is that (a) founders have to get comfortable giving up a lot more equity for more capital, (b) investors have to be comfortable paying much higher valuations for early-stage companies, (c) employees have to be willing to take more stock in lieu of cash, or (d) companies have to do more remote hiring. I see a mix of all four happening depending on the particular circumstances of each company (e.g. famous founders will be able to raise more at higher valuation)
It's all pretty simple. The landlords win and everyone else loses. The situation will only get better once remote work is more widely accepted, but I'm starting to think it might come to that, with how expensive things are here. A nothing-special sandwich in Oakland, CA where I live is almost $15, at some point you say enough is enough and go somewhere where such an obscene price level is a joke, not day-to-day reality.
> The situation will only get better once remote work
No, that's not the only way. The real way for the situation to get better is for the local governments to adopt high-density zoning regulations, which would lead to the following:
-residential high-rises
-dense public transportation networks
-multi-use buildings (stores/services on ground floors, residential above)
-a real walking and cycling infrastructure that doesn't make you feel suicidal when you use it
-walkable neighborhoods
Whatever the price of the land is, the 20-story apartment high-rise will fetch more in rent than the two-story complex on the same land, even if the rent is 5x lower.
Simultaneously, you will be inclined far less to drive (or own) your vehicle if you commute by train and pick up your groceries on the 5-minute walk from the subway top to you home. This helps consolidate more people on a smaller expanse of land, reduce traffic, etc.
I'm not talking about having a Tokyo by the Bay. Such policies aren't unrealistic even by the US standards. What I wrote above can be found in Brooklyn.
I never realized it until you wrote it down explicitly, but you're right. Landlords laugh all the way to the bank, while the rest of the economy pays their tax. Amazing.
They aren't reducing people's salaries who "de-locate." So if they're clawing back any salary, it's long-term by giving them lower raises. It takes a while for that to kick in.
I think it is lock-in. Not just because it makes it somewhat harder to get in front of other companies, but because making a Bay Area kind of salary in a place with a non-Bay-Area cost of living sounds like the kind of thing that could make an employee very comfortable and very unwilling to go looking for another job. If you're getting like an equivalent of +$30k (or more), even if another company says, "Oh, sure, we'll hire you for $20k over your current salary... but you'll need to move back to the Bay Area," that's an offer you're much less likely to take than if you were already in the Bay Area. And local companies in your new place-of-work are unlikely to be able to match your existing salary.
High cost of living because competitive labor market. Competitive labor market because high cost of living.
You could break the vicious circle from either end. Build more houses, costs go down, more immigrants attracted, wages go down and costs go back up. Destroy local jobs, wages go down, fewer immigrants attracted, costs go down and wages go back up.
Every tech company that moves out eases the pressure, but that part about wages going down is tough for some people to swallow.
It is not just more housing, but also denser housing. And more distributed campuses.
Also the higher savings amount from bay area leaks into other regions. I hear texanians complain about swes from bay area inflating housing over there, for example.
- Opportunities are just not comparable almost anywhere less expensive: there are tens of thousands of jobs from hundreds of employers here in the Bay Area for technology that pays well, compared with hundreds or maybe a few thousand jobs for maybe a dozen or few tens of employers
Also the "monoculture" dig applies to tech specifically: in terms of actual cultural diversity very few places are as interesting.
Or just work in the South Bay. All the really dominant Bay Area tech companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix - also Cisco, Intel, Juniper, NVidia, even Hewlett-Packard and IBM) are here.
We had a dev working for the summer who got a job at an SF startup this past week. He's making $2k a week, but his rent for his apartment costs $3k and he's got roommates. As someone who has lived off of $40k and rented a $1.4k a month loft that was absolutely palatial, in the middle of the city with great views, this sounds like insanity. My coworker who is from the Boston area was similarly aghast at the differences in cost of living.
Have fun at your nice job, but I'm not coming home to roommates for $3k a month. The numbers don't really seem to work out, a lot of people are basically selling great living conditions for the chance to go work at companies that probably won't be there in a few years and really aren't doing anything interesting.
Also the "monoculture" dig applies to tech specifically: in terms of actual cultural diversity very few places are as interesting.
I feel like people who say this about any city haven't gotten out much in other cities.
FYI, you don't need to pay $3k - I lived in the Mission / Potrero Hill area (with roommates, mind you) for a few years, and my rent had always been between $1000-1850/mo.
Centrally located, safe(-ish), and beautiful. You can run through Bernal Heights Park, get ice cream at Humphrey Slocombe, and bike to the 24 Hour Fitness on 16th and Potrero. If you're in tech, you can definitely live well in SF :)
My rent in Boston was $600 a month with roommates in an amazing renovated 2,600 sq ft apartment. A cheap vegetarian lunch was $5 instead of $10. My groceries were cheaper, there weren't homeless folks everywhere and salaries are about the same. In Boston I was rich; here, I watch what I spend and clean my own house. Too bad the jobs there were brutally boring.
The inability of this area to build sufficient housing has a significant, material impact on our quality of life.
Or commute a little. If you're paying multiples the cost to live 30 minutes away and commute, that's because you've attributed a high value on that locality, so complaining that it's too expensive doesn't make much sense.
Yeah, living with roommates for 3k a month is a choice. I know people (myself included) who live with roommates, in nice places in desirable neighborhoods in SF, for 1/3 to 1/2 that.
Yes, it is very expensive (2 kids here). It's not appreciably more expensive than a Midwest town unless you really want that super premium private school.
Schools in the Bay Area can become pretty poor once you are in a more affordable area. If you want a decent school the rent/mortgage will reflect that.
You should be putting away a small percentage of your salary per month. Or else you are living above your means. So 5% of a high salary is larger than 5% of a lower. Or can be even higher than 10% of another area.
I don't think it's reasonable to say you should be putting away a percentage of your gross. You have taxes and expenses, and your savings comes out of what's left. My point was that "what's left" part can be larger even with a smaller salary, depending on where you live.
For jobs in this industry salaries everywhere are sufficient that a person should be saving the maximum percentage his company will match away in a 401k as a minimum (it's free money, more or less), if it's offered. Personally, I put 50% over the minimum in my 401k and then have after-tax allocations to savings and conservative stock (dividend paying) investments. If a 401k isn't offered, there are plenty of other ways to save some (smaller) post-tax amount.
Here's the thing: for tech jobs in these low CoL areas the salary is also lower, so the 401k contribution is lower and one is more likely to have to contribute a smaller percentage because a greater percentage of the gross is spent on living expenses.
The only cost of living item that is grossly out of whack with reason in the Bay Area is housing. It's not out of whack to the point that the entire boost in salary is consumed by housing expense.
Seattle is pretty close on salary/jobs and cost of living is much lower/no state income tax.
Although there are some people that seem to only find enjoyment bitching about the weather which I find hilarious coming from the midwest where the temperature can swing 60 degrees in a day, summers are so hot that you sweat sitting down, and winters are so cold that you only see bundles of clothing walking around. I'll take mild temperatures, mountains, lakes/oceans, and a little bit of overcast over wild temperature swings, flat land, no water, and a bit more sun anyday.
In my experience, 8 months out of the year it will be very windy and ~60 degrees. Even if the rest of the bay has good weather on a particular day, there's a good chance it's foggy over much of the peninsula.
This isn't my experience. I've lived in the bay area for a while now. It's very warm and sunny most of the year. The peninsula gets too much sun if anything. It's getting over 95F too many days of the year now.
Fog is really only a thing to Pacifica/San Bruno. After that, fog doesn't really occur that much.
None of the points you list are at all unique to the Bay Area.
The person you are replying to is highlighting the high cost of living and tax burden in the Bay Area (relative to other parts of the US). It is disingenuous to respond by claiming that a pro of living in the Bay Area is "Being rich AF".
This seems pretty genius. There is a surplus of highly skilled engineers in the Bay Area who are getting mediocre pay (when cost of living is taken into consideration). This allows Zapier to attract more of these highly skilled workers and not pay a premium to those in the bay area.
I don't know if it's genius. To those of us who have never lived in the Bay Area and are perpetually sticker shocked by housing costs, it's really, really obvious.
When compared to cost of living, sure. But factor in savings rate and opportunities and the cost of living cut is well worth it.
For example, I pay 2.5x in rent for a smaller place compared to what I was paying for a mortgage before I moved here. But my salary is 2x and a bit, and I'm saving more than 2x as a result.
The only expense that went up appreciably was housing. Basic expenses for everything else averages out to be about the same. Internet and commute costs are about the same, food is slightly more expensive, and utilities (power, water) slightly less than where we were.
I kept my 401k rate the same and effectively doubled the amount of money I'm saving. It's not my only savings, but it is the bulk of it.
There are plenty of good, cheap restaurants and bars in the city. I know: I frequent them.
I will give you that the number of outrageously priced restaurants and bars in SF has increased. People just don't seem to give a fuck about piling on debt. I think the insane cost of rent has had a psychological effect on incoming people. Or perhaps some other social phenomenon that brings them here is correlated with absolutely no sense of money.
$10,000 is a strong relocation package but the fine print is pretty clear that it's for reimbursement - not as a signing bonus.
You'd have to pay me pretty well to even consider moving to the Bay Area with today's housing prices. But if I'm already there with the salary I want, it may take even more to get me to leave. Certainly more than $10k in moving reimbursement.
Agreed, the fact that I can drive to virtually any of the worlds largest tech companies and many of its promising startups from my current work is worth a lot more than 10k. Once that pressure is removed, I assume employers will pay market rate at wherever you relocated to.
And hope that the REALLY big quake doesn't get you. You know, the one off your coast that is estimated at 100x anything that the San Andreas fault can produce.
No, don't tell anyone. There are no jobs in Seattle, it's all a lie from Amazon, microsoft, facebook, hulu, google, tableau, memsql, and 1000 other startups.
If it helps, think of the US as structured like the EU. Lots of common laws but lots that vary from state to state in the details (just like the separate countries).
> From someone outside the US, I'm amazed that states vary their income tax so much, I would have thought it's a magnet for fraud and corruption.
It is. Roads in the Bay Area are among the worst in the country, despite this region producing enormous corporate profits. Nearly all the companies here operate in an eternal tragedy of the commons, whereby nobody will pay local taxes because nobody else does. All the companies in California are actually Delaware companies, and the income inequality and quality-of-life disparity is a direct result of this kind of corruption.
All the companies in California are actually Delaware companies, and the income inequality and quality-of-life disparity is a direct result of this kind of corruption.
From my understanding, being a Delaware company saves you $0 in taxes. All of those corporations are registered as foreign corps in CA and paying taxes just as if they were CA-based corporations. Taxes aren't why you do DE.
> All the companies in California are actually Delaware companies, and the income inequality and quality-of-life disparity is a direct result of this kind of corruption.
Why would you call that corruption?
Corruption from whose perspective?
How much impact do you think that has on roads being maintained or not (or more generally, local/state funding and budget management)?
Look at the corruption like gerrymandering. Systematic wealth collection by mega corporations and individuals, structured to increase their wealth and the expense of the poor. A structure that allows for this is a corrupt structure.
To answer your question, I would say this has has high impact on the quality of life here, including the roads, education systems, policing, safety, and everything else in society. Everything is interconnected, and our society's structures are built with the assumption of no corruption. But there is a lot, it's pervasive and defining, and it has numerous consequences like poor quality of life for a lot of people in a high-expense area.
The Bay Area has some of the best schools in the country. Cupertino public schools for example. As far as roads, I don’t think you’ve ever driven in New Jersey: they have really high taxes and really terrible roads. Driving through Jersey City was like driving through Beirut – despite extremely high property taxes. Road quality has nothing to do with Delaware corporations.
How does that cause income inequality? Taxes ought having nothing to do with income equality. The purpose of taxes is to pay for the operation of government, not to “solve” income inequality. Taxes are meant to pay for government. The United States isn’t socialist. I also don’t think you understand how corporate taxes work. A Delaware company operating in California does pay California taxes.
My approach was to ask OP for elaboration just for the comedy of watching their argument fall apart, but with the opportunity that they had a sound clarification or new information I hadn't considered.
Can you elaborate on how that specific fraud and corruption would work?
Many states and some entire countries simply don't fund themselves by stealing from people's paycheck, but usually passively tax other kinds of transactions.
There are lots of opportunities using combinations of the 50 states, territories and non-US jurisdictions.
I used inflammatory wording to get attention. But either way you should be able to perceive the relative morality of it whether "due process" is involved or not.
Why would you even do that, it adds nothing to the discussion, it just polarizes views. There are interesting questions to be asked about taxation and welfare but we aren't going to get that now are we.
There is nothing competitive about the wages in Denver when you're comparing to CA. Cost of living is lower than SV, but still one of the highest in the country.
Have any numbers you'd care to furnish? Cost of living may be one of the highest, but you can easily get a 2 bedroom or a house in the burbs for $1500. It's quite easy to allocated less than a third of your take home to rent, unlike SV, Seattle, NYC, Boston, etc.
I agree with you, here are some numbers to back up Denver is great COL vs salary wise. I work remotely as a mid-level DevOps guy for about $115k and no equity. I bought a 3 br house with a yard next to a light rail station 10 min drive 20 min train ride to downtown. I bought during the recession for ~220k ($350k ish now) but rent in our neighborhood for a similar house would be $1800 total. If I were moving here today and renting, we'd rent a 1 br apartment nearby for about $1100.
You're either new to Colorado or ignorant of your (adopted?) state's history: this phenomenon is as old as Colorado itself, dating back to the Colorado Gold Rush of 1859. You're welcome to complain about the people who followed you, of course (a phenomenon that's also as old as Colorado), but please do not pretend that you have an exclusive concession on a state that its inhabitants have been redefining since before you were born.
Sorry, but no. CS is uber conservative, but not remotely libertarian. They're fine with using the government to enforce morality, the antithesis of libertarian ideals. And the weed was definitely NOT driven by CS. The conservatives there think it's ruining their state.
I live in Austin. It's really not that bad. Sure there are many people coming from CA (like I did 3 years ago) but Texas in general and also Austin in particular have distinct enough cultures that they haven't become just another CA. Just my personal opinion of course.
My near 40 years in Texas says otherwise. Yes, Texas culture is strong but the West Coast invasion has been felt. Less so in Austin because it was already a liberal place. Politics aside, the ethos was more similar to the West Coast.
We're used to waves of people moving in though and that's probably also what makes it somewhat less felt from the newcomers. We call ourselves the friendly state because of our welcoming attitude. However, I think if we ever flip from red to blue the pre-recession Texans are going to freak out.
It's almost as if you believe there are only 3 tech companies in Seattle.
Heck, those 3 aren't even the only big tech companies in Seattle, there's Apple, Facebook, Oracle, Twitter, etc. etc. let alone all the other smaller ones. There's more tech companies here than you can shake a stick at.
An office doesn't have to "taken seriously", whatever that means, to provide you a job, which is all we're talking about. WalterSear even mentioned a satellite office in his post.
So you're getting paid to relocate to somewhere farther away from the bay. Maybe your salary will go farther, but you're giving up the whole reason people move to the bay area in the first place: It's where the jobs are.
The bay area is what it is because there's a feedback loop. People setup here because there are jobs. There are jobs here because there are people to fill them. By relocating away you're giving up your mobility to other bay area jobs. That might be great while you keep that job, but then you're at a disadvantage (again) when you decide to move again.
I never understood a real-estate fee of 6-7%. Real estate agent is what you become if you don't like work and have no other way to be productive to society in my opinion.
Once you leave the Bay Area, it becomes exponentially more difficult to come back, so the what-if scenario of this employment expiring becomes a real threat to financial viability.
Not if you keep your house (assuming you own) and rent it. Many lucky folks can rent for significantly more than cost/PITI, adding another passive income stream.
So the pitch is:
1) De-locate to a more reasonable real-estate market where you can actually buy the house you want/need.
2) Rent-out your existing SFBay property if you own, and get additional income (even minus property management cut)
3) Get a bonus
4) Maybe move closer to family outside of SFBay.
What's not said:
1) Career mobility is limited to whatever market you move to and within Zapier.
2) Salary probably likely won't make same leaps as if you stayed
3) You might have family in the SFBay - could be a downside to move away
If you're career-stable and open to move it can be a good deal.
I really enjoyed the podcast! It was probably the most impressive CEO I’ve heard, love the idea that he tslks to CEO a year or two away from where he is and picks their brains!
That is a horrible format. I don't want to listen. I want to scroll and read at my speed. The most that I can use is what, 15% of my screen? And partway through reading it, it decided to start playing anyways and jump back to the beginning.
If someone (eg me) wants a transcript, make it easy to get the transcript!
I'm guessing this offer is going to be extremely popular. The second you leave the bay area, it's like getting a million dollar signing bonus for a place to live.
I'm a little surprised more workers aren't leaving SF and the bay area peninsula. Even if you take 50% pay cut, your still getting paid a lot more, relative to you cost of living. I'm guessing the reason is: us engineers have a hard time understanding and thinking about compensation in terms of living costs, hence only the absolute $ value of a salary is taken into account.
Also, I think a lot of people don't want to move away from friends and family.
Interesting podcast. I didn't know about Zapier so I checked out their website.
It took me like 5-10 minutes to understand what they do. It was only after seeing the Gmail(attachment) > DropBox > Slack I understood what they really do. Which is very cool.
I have one need. I want a quick way of converting a list of stuff on slack into todo list with ability to check off the task as they're completed. OR if I can have a keyword --TODO-- --END-- in gmail and turn it into a todo list. Will Zapier allow something like this?
Zapier Support here. The most common way I see people do this is by starring Slack messages they want to add as Todos. Here's a template that uses Todoist, although there's no shortage of alternatives on that side of things: https://zapier.com/app/editor/template/1580
Outside of that, you can build a zap that triggers on any message and use a Filter step to make sure only messages that meet your criteria(e.g. your keyword) move on to the action: https://zapier.com/help/how-get-started-filters-zapier/
If your ultimate goal is to manage the todo list from inside Slack, there's not a great way to do that with Zapier. Personally, I manually add/delete items in my 'You' channel to get to that type of functionality.
If you want to attract talent outside the Bay Area, pay better. Even with the insane cost of living, I still end up ahead financially when I've compared to other places.
I live and work in a small midwestern town because my wife's military job has us here. If I was single, however, I would make the most of my remoteness and try working from a variety of towns. Here's some places that I would try if I was a young remote worker:
- A small Colorado/Utah/Montana ski town. Some place like Telluride, where I could ski/hike/bike in the mornings
- A fun desert town with great recreation like Moab, UT...Prescott, AZ...Bend, OR...
- A beach town in S. Florida during the winter
- Costa Rica, Panama, Bay Islands of Honduras in the wintertime
- Thailand
- South coast of Texas in the Winter, Texas Hill Country in the fall
It could be so much fun...