Honest question: at that point why not move closer to work? Or get a job at any number of companies closer to home that are desperate for talent?

The whole point of enduring SFBA rent is that there’s dozens of tech jobs at every corner.

Well that's where you live now. Average worker changes jobs 12 times in a career. Is your plan to just move 12 times (and pay the costs associated with that)? Or work at the same job for much longer (and pay the costs associated with that)?

One of the benefits of living in a large metro area is the amount of job opportunities, but it you put an 8 minute circle around your residence and only look for jobs within that, that negates those benefits.

Just one person’s view: My Bay Area commute is about 2 to 2.5 hours each way, depending on traffic. I make pretty decent Bay Area money but not even close to enough to live in an equivalent house near work. Not by a long shot. Changing jobs means starting back at the bottom. Re-build relationships, re-learn new company’s tribal knowledge, start at zero in the promotion treadmill. I’m too old for that shit. And at my age, (45+) you’re not getting a +10% raise when changing jobs, like what was do-able in your 30s.

So changing jobs is mostly downside and moving closer to work is not financially do-able. Stuck!

Assuming true, that would be limited to the silicon valley and new york area.

Try to work in tech in smaller cities and you will quickly realize that there are few employers and they can be picky.

Having worked in Silicon Valley for a few decades, that's exactly where I live.

Maybe you just need to upgrade your social circle?

IF

The problem is that most people in tech understand that your job in gone in 5 years, 10 years at the outside. Given that I need 4 jobs over my lifetime (at least), I'm going to stay where I can get my next job even if that area is expensive.

If I find a good job in St. Louis, Cincinnati, or Pittsburgh, what happens when that job goes away? Now I have to move to San Jose, Austin, Boston anyway AND I'm going to have a difficult time because my family is used to that big house and yard in the suburbs, but I didn't put enough money away fast enough to make the jump to the more expensive area because my salary was 30% less.

95% of people don't get that choice.

What junior engineer is going to turn down an offer from Google because the Mountain View area is a wildly expensive dump?

You apply at companies with remote roles. I haven't lived in SF though, and would never do so, so I can't speak to solving for timing the market there.

While a good principle, I'll posit there are a lot of more or less specialized professional jobs--especially at more senior levels--where you can't just walk across the street and slide into a similar role at a different company. Even if it's in the same general area, a 2 hour commute each way is probably not sustainable.

You probably wouldn't, though. You're probably not going to relocate to Tulsa or St. Louis or wherever, because once you start looking at the decision seriously, you're going to realize that even if this one particular company has attractive jobs there, if you ever want to leave or get laid off or whatnot, the rest of the job market there ain't so great.

It's the kind of thing that sounds great initially, but starts to fall apart upon deeper analysis.

So basically silicon valley which is one of the highest cost of living places these days and has terrible traffic?

I don't live there, but the hub (city) and spoke (suburb) model seems to scale much better than the point to point where jobs and homes are distributed everywhere like silicon valley and thus everyone has to drive.

If we stay within the context of software engineering jobs, I'd define it as something using latest tech and pushing new frontiers in different areas (AI, machine learning, distributed computing, dev ops).

So it would be jobs working with interesting tech (things like functional programming, or something like Tensorflow, microservices with Kubernetes and Golang, using newest dev ops and automation stack, distributed systems etc) and on interesting problems and novel ideas. Majority of these jobs will concentrate in big tech hubs where it makes sense to invest heavily into R&D like this.

Outside of major tech cities these jobs will be more sporadic and most jobs will be for companies which treat tech as a cost centre so you will end up working on some boring internal CRM systems made from bunch of enterprise overpriced products with horrible APIs glued together with some Java or PHP code.

>> Right now I work about 4 miles from my house, which is a 10 minute drive without touching a highway.

I live about 15-20 min walk from my office currently. If a city has sane transport system it might be more efficient than driving a car. I understand commuting to work by car is more of a US thing. At least in Europe in most major cities you can use mass transit (and most people do). I don't actually need to own a car and can save money as I don't need to buy expensive piece of metal that will start depreciating the same day I bought it, no need for insurance or parking space.

>> Most people want to live in big cities for the big cities - not because of the jobs there.

Of course. I agree. Lifestyle is a major reason why people want to live in NYC or London etc. But I also think that unique and plentiful career opportunities are an important reason. There are simply opportunities you won't wind anywhere else.

>> In fact, that'd be impossible, because now I have a yard, a dog, and a car. A 10 minute commute in NYC would pretty much require me to be in a small apartment.

This is true. I have only lived in tiny apartments my whole life so imagining living in a house with lots of space and a yard/garden is very appealing. Definitely would prefer that.

You shouldn't. If you have a good job in such a location and are happy with the opportunities available, enjoy!

The problem is that markets naturally congregate in distinct locations so anyone who is looking to advance their career needs to make their way to a hub.

Correct.

There's no networking without working your arse off in those locales.

And if there are only 3-4 employers in town, you better believe that you don't want to lose your job, ever.

I can not recommend, in today's economy, a software engineer ever moving to a place without knowing there is an existing job creation engine running. It's too risky.

On the other hand, I'd move to Detroit if the employer was willing to 100% financially derisk the move (full relo, golden parachute on departure for any reason, massive funding of retirement, massive pay). :)

I'm struggling to read that... Are you saying that moving to somewhere like Silicon Valley is worth it or not worth it?

I'm curious to know what your current thoughts are behind this. As someone who intentionally has steered clear of both those areas in order to try to optimize financially I sometimes wonder whether I'm missing out on something. Obviously one can learn more from better engineers, but don't the brightest ideas from the brightest engineers wind up being written about online and/or presented at conferences at user groups and broadcast across the Internet? Or does having the opportunity to put time into a name-brand tech company for a while really increase lifelong salary or career prospects sufficiently to recover the money thrown away on rent there? Or is there really sufficient value in serendipitous collaboration/socialization to justify moving to one of these places? Is there some other question I've overlooked?

the long term root is that there is a huge productivity advantage to clusters of workers. (or, at least many people believe so) Around here, if you strike up a random conversation in public, it's very likely you will do so with someone who does something relevant to what you do, and this is good for getting new ideas and really good for getting new contacts. Right now? there's a huge concentration of programming know-how in silicon valley and san francisco, and building that sort of cluster somewhere else would be really difficult. (I think Los Angeles has a similar situation, only with the movie industry.)

I literally found someone to buy my company at a (non-industry) party. (I mean, I did a bad job of it, I was drinking too much and complaining loudly about how much it sucks to run a company and how I had fucked up like three really good chances to sell the thing and generally being a downer, which is rude, I think, at a party, but also not how you maximize the value of the company you sell. Still, I got an impactful amount of money, and more importantly, I got someone else to run the damn thing so I could go get a job that paid without dumping my existing customers.) I've solved technical problems in similar sorts of ways; it's completely normal to go hang out with friends and actually solve problems over drinks or pizza or whatever. (which yes, is a culture some people hate, and I totally understand that, but some of us like it, and like it or not, it's certainly effective.)

Another bigger microeconomic factor that people who don't live here don't understand is that California laws and cultural norms are set up to privilege people who have been here longer. If you bought a place here in '08? Silicon valley isn't very expensive at all; our property taxes are largely fixed based on what we paid for the place when we bought it. This is kinda true (but to a much lessor extent) for rents; I know a lot of people paying under 2/3rds what they'd pay in rent if they moved in today, even without rent control. with rent control, paying under 1/3rd what they'd pay if they moved in today is not uncommon. This means that the sticker shock you get from the outside looking in isn't actually what most of the people who have lived here long term are paying.

I disagree strongly. I think the most valuable thing about silicon valley is that I can walk to tens of small employers, from my house, and at least two big employers who could reasonably hire me.

In bicycling or uber distance, there are thousands of small places and hundreds of large employers.

Because I live in the silicon valley, I can switch jobs almost on a whim; I don't have to move, I don't have to upset my social circles, etc...

I think this is actually a big part of why Silicon Valley is valuable both to the workers and to the employers; there's a huge pool of people and a huge pool of jobs that we can match up without inconveniencing anyone. You don't have to settle for the job that is nearby or for the employee who is willing to move.

The average time of employment in the tech sector for people under 40 in tech is under 4 years. Your plan is untenable because it involves frequent personal relocation to make feasible.