This is probably a big reason why gigantic cities are continuing to grow everywhere. The best way to reduce the stress of being laid off is to move somewhere with as many employers as possible.
Agreed. Years ago my wife and I considered moving to my hometown, a medium sized city with affordable housing (at the time).
There are a grand total of 2 employers in her field in the whole city. It’s simply not possible to reliably grow her career there.
In the end we stayed in our expensive city; in 4 years she got promoted twice, then had multiple competing offers for a new job when her employer went under. Career growth, top wages, and a plethora of jobs are available here. The only reason not to stay is because a decent condo starts at a million, but we got in at 3% interest rate so even that turned out okay.
A few years ago, I moved to Boston for a tech job. The cost of living was like 25% higher, but my salary almost doubled, so I came out for the better.
This job was on-site, so there was no choice but to live here. And by "here" I mean a 60- to 90- minute commute, both ways.
Now? My job is 100% remote, and any job I would consider would have to be 100% remote. Assuming this trend continues, I think we'll see an exodus from high cost of living areas to (slightly) smaller towns.
People are still going to want to live in places that have services, entertainment, and so on, so this isn't going to gut cities, but it will make living in the sticks more plausible.
> and any job I would consider would have to be 100% remote.
The problem is that if you lose your job this plan will crumble on first contact with the enemy. I'm job hunting right now, and between 'ghost jobs', bad recruiters, low ballers, take-homes with unstated requirements, leetcode grinding, system design studying, optimization for "best talent, lowest salary", and the fact that workers have absolutely no power means you don't have a choice how you work at some point.
Once savings start to dry up, you'll work in person. You'll move if they ask, you'll take a lower salary and a worse position... after all, do you want to eat?
It's time to unionize the tech sector. Can you imagine how industrial action (shutting down APIs) could cripple a fortune 500 company. Sadly people don't act in their best interest. Execs and capitalists only hold power as long as we give them power.
It makes more sense to focus on the capital-intensive and oligopolistic parts, e.g. cloud computing, social media and advertising. Tech, broadly, maintains a threat of new entrants.
In the technology sector, our income and share of remote work is actually pretty good. For example, most of us (in the U.S., in technology) are in or close to the top 10% of individual incomes in the United States.
I'm going through this right now but already have a remote contracting job for less than I was making but putting out feelers for in-person. The in-person jobs are usually an hour away and pay more.
Problem is waking up everyday at 6:30 am so I can be in office by 9 is a huge mental and physical stress. Moving closer isn't an option because I own my house. Right now my thinking is do I want to spend an extra 4-5 hours per day on my career just to work in a shitty cubicle for only 30k more? I'm honestly leaning towards putting up with less money and waiting for another opportunity to cross my path.
If shit really hits the fan I can sell my California house and buy a whole house outright in another part of the country and sustain myself easily. I'm just choosing to stay here but I really don't have to.
It all depends. I am remote for the last 20+ years. I have my own company but still I have to find new clients and I did not really have problems in that department.
Freelancing is a whole different game. Once you've built your network and brand you have options. I'd love to be a freelancer but I'm not competent enough with the self promotion/marketing, and couldn't handle the mental toll of the lean months.
It is also possible for talented people to set up their own businesses, even though we all have spent our entire childhood having it drilled into our heads that our purpose is to serve for somebody else.
Similar story. I have been remote for a decade, acquired real estate in LCOL locales, and have prioritized financial independence so that if I ever end up not being able to find another remote job after my last, I don't ever have to go back into an office. It is about having agency over how one wants to live their life and the freedom one wants. You will never get that time back. Life is short, and a commute is a waste of life. I prefer to not waste life for corporate upper management feels about in person work.
What we save on living in a HCOL locale, we can spend on traveling several months out of the year while I work remote.
I live close enough to access an expensive metro but I'm far enough out my property isn't that expensive plus I bought it a long time ago. Only commuted in for while and, then, not every day. Other commutes--when I've done them--have been reasonable drives.
Over the years I occasionally toyed with buying a small city place but, in addition to the increasing real estate prices, I always came back to the fact that I can always get a hotel or whatever in that or any other city if I want to spend some time in an urban location.
> People are still going to want to live in places that have services, entertainment, and so on, so this isn't going to gut cities, but it will make living in the sticks more plausible.
The mass exodus already happened.
Everybody who wanted to leave what they thought was overpriced pretty much already did.
We might see some continuation - but given that companies are trying to claw back as much remote work as possible - I'm skeptical.
I moved to Greenville, South Carolina when COVID hit and absolutely loved it. Perfect weather, good balance of space, cost, and still enough active cities if one wants to eat at nice restaurants.
My biggest fear about remote work is the trend will reverse and I'll be at a huge disadvantage trying to negotiate a new position. Though everything I've read seems to indicate the trend is here to stay.
I read that Jamie Dimon's office is a fully decked out apartment on Park Ave (NYC) so for all his griping about remote work, he essentially works from home full time.
I'm sure Diamond would be happy to have company provided housing, and pay employees in company script that is good at the company store -- imagine the profit potential!
I'd take a paycut just to work from home. My parents aren't getting any younger and I want them to spend time with my children and I want them to experience small city life.
The perverse side-effect is that smaller towns are getting expensive as hell too as more and more people don't care about staying in the city. Things raised ~30% in the last 5 years in my area, in a medium-sized agricultural town some ways outside Montreal.
Fully remote work being the norm has been proven to be a COVID phenomenon. A large portion of tech companies small or large have been pushing for at least 2-3 office days ever since lockdown measures ended.
Fully remote work doesn't eliminate the risk of layoffs throwing a wrench into your life. It's only viable for senior/staff level devs who have much higher job mobility compared to everyone else in the tech sector.
The real answer is her question, "why would I move?" Recruiter probably didn't have a good response.
But for a lot of people the answer is "I want to live somewhere else." I relocated away from a really nice job with challenging work and interesting co-workers simply because I didn't like where I was living. I suspect that I'm not the only one.
You can have offers "you can't refuse" even if you live in a major hub. But it's mostly the case that then it's a matter of you really wanting to do something on net as opposed to having to move to keep food on the table.
This varies a lot for different people at different stages of life.
For some, +$20,000 to their current salary is an offer they can't refuse, for others, they would need to double their existing six figure salary to even consider moving to another hub.
Anyone would move for a limited time period for a life changing amount of money like $20m/year.
But for realistic wages in my field, I doubt there is anywhere that would pay me enough to move. Short of moving into management (which I have little experience with) the most I could expect for making a move would be about an extra $40-60k/year moving to the Bay area which would basically cover the difference in cost of living and maybe a little extra pocket change.
Yeah. When a lot of classmates were taking jobs in Manhattan I pretty much decided you couldn't pay me enough after having an internship there one summer. (This was back in the 80s to boot.)
But, of course, I didn't literally mean that. Offer me a few million a year guaranteed and I could put up with a lot for life-changing money for a bit. But realistically not going to happen.
for $20M/year you are not really "moving". I are just getting another (very comfortable) place of residence, and you can travel as you see fit (incl. private jets).
Then you wouldn't even move. Just rent some apartment for a year and then return home when you're done. That's more than enough to pay for a mortgage and rent.
I could say the same. Money and a particularly nice location, that might be different.
Once the basics and some future security are there, more money just means a bigger resource footprint. That's still nice to have, people certainly continue preferring wealth over poverty, but it would be crazy if trade-off thresholds between modesty and ambition didn't shift a little due to awareness of environmental impact.
New York Times ran an article yesterday saying otherwise. First tier cities, in terms of size, are losing people, but second tier cities are growing. The cost of living in the largest cities puts a negative force on moving to them.
The first tier cities are getting more and more expensive (partially or perhaps primarily do to employment opportunities - i.e. safety) and instead of moving "away from a city", people are moving to other less expensive cities with employment opportunities which, as they grow, become more expensive and repeat the process. And also you have to compare to trends over time.
Class and Industry segmentation probably plays a role in tier 2 city growth as well.
For example, high value manufacturing in the Bay Area (eg. chiplets, electronics) got priced out to San Joaquin Valley and helped lead to the growth of Sacramento; Bay Area tech new grad salaries got so inflated that internships, new grad, and H1B roles in Sales, Professional Services, and SWE started relocating to Austin and Dallas in the 2010s; and back office roles in Accounting+Finance began moving from NYC to Charlotte in the late 2010s as salaries for those roles began breaching the 100k mark in NYC.
If I'm someone specialized in Solutions Engineering or Back Office work, I'd probably find a comparable amount of job opportunities in Austin or Charlotte as I would in the Bay or NYC, with the added benefit of affordability.
I can't find the NYT article, in the US it seems like LA, SF and NYC specifically are shrinking a bit, while other metropoles are still growing. In Europe this doesn't seem to hold true at all, with London, Paris, Berlin and Madrid all growing quickly.
As you correctly point out, there's an equilibrium between cost of living and the advantages large cities are offering. Here in Berlin we are starting to feel the pressure hard, but it is still much cheaper than the other big European cities, and thus growing by 200k a year.
In Western Europe, you have the primary city effect which is causing London and Paris to grow like crazy. For non-tech people, you are hard pressed to find well paying professional job opportunities outside of London and Paris in the UK and France respectively, and businesses began leaving Barcelona for Madrid after the political instability caused by the Catalonia Independence referendum.
Berlin's is probably the only major example I can think of a city growing due to actual growth opportunities, but then again Germany is also a much healthier economy than most of Europe.
The US on the other hand doesn't have a primary city in the same manner that most of Europe has - the US economy is pretty decentralized across multiple hub cities (Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, DC, NYC, Boston, Chicago, Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Seattle) the same way Germany is (Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg)
We do get a primary city effect at the state level in many cases. At that point it can be a bit like jumping from Paris to Berlin. Perfectly easy to do for EU citizens assuming you can handle the life upheaval and expense. At least the US doesn't have the language barriers to deal with.
> a bit like jumping from Paris to Berlin. Perfectly easy to do for EU citizens assuming you can handle the life upheaval and expense
This is a MASSIVE assumption to have. The language barrier you brought up has a massive impact for example, along with other smaller intricacies (eg. Taxes, Drivers License, Immigration depending on your nationality, bureaucratic experience, etc). Moving from Paris to Berlin or Oulu to Varna isn't some walk in the park.
And several states don't have primary city effect either (eg. CA, TX, OH, FL, NC), and bureaucratic norms in most cases within the 50 states are normalized for individual cases.
> Substantial population loss in some of the nation’s largest and most vibrant cities was the primary reason 2021 was the slowest year of population growth in U.S. history, new Census data shows.
> Although some of the fastest growing regions in the country continued to boom, the gains were nearly erased by stark losses last year in counties that encompass the New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas.
> The pandemic played a role, as the number of people dying rose substantially and many Americans left cities for smaller places. But experts say that skyrocketing housing costs were also to blame, and that some of the changes are a continuation of fundamental shifts in American demographics that began before the pandemic, such as the steadily falling birthrate and steep drop in immigration.
It's hard for me to justify living in one of the most expensive cities unless it's connected to employment in some way (or I have more money than I know what to do with). Yes, they're often nice (in some ways). But a lot of smaller cities have nice walkable cores if that's your thing. Or you can just visit big cities now and then if you want to.
I think the parent post's point is not that its less likely to get laid off, but rather that there are prospects for employement that don't require relocation when you de get laid off.
Or work remotely. From somewhere cheap. It truly feels like a hack.
Not sure if these conditions will remain but it's just nuts atm. Entry/Mid level engineers out-earning local principal engineers with 30+ years experience.
I don’t think what you’re saying and what GP is saying are incompatible. Many people choose to work exclusively remotely so they can live where they want; those who want top wages, or who are in a non-remote-compatible field tend to prefer the big city with the jobs available in such.
I’d also like the point out:
> Everyone in my area (hour outside a major city) is basically the same
If you live only an hour outside a major city, you’re still living in the metropolitan region of a big city.
Really? Burned down implies thousands of buildings in a single city. The displacement of hundreds of thousands. Please, name one city where that happened.
Same source says 71 buildings set on fire. Does not mention if any were completely burned. Criteria for damage seems to be any damage at all. Saying the city was "sacked" might be more accurate, but even then that is wrong. There are tens of thousands if not hundreds if thousands of buildings in Chicago, 71 (less than 0.01%) having had any fire does not seem to really qualify as "the city was burned down"
Further, the damage seemingly was concentrated in poor neighborhoods. Hence, citation should be provided that fear post George Floyd backlash is a major reason for tech workers to leave Chicago. From the same reference:
" They missed signals that the killing of Floyd, captured on video and played millions of times by horrified Americans, could touch off looting. And to this day, they face resentment that the city prioritized the protection of downtown at the expense of residential neighborhoods inhabited mostly by people of color."
On the other hand, the reference does say the backlash and riots caused more damage than following MLK Jr's assassination does provide reasonable context to the scale of the event. Yet, with higher numbers of businesses, it might be there is more stuff to be damaged that lead to a larger figure of monetary damage (but that is still to say that both back-lashes were seemingly at least on par)
> 700 buildings damaged, burnt, or destroyed in Minneapolis.
Classic "how to lie with numbers". 698 buildings with a broken window, one with a minor fire, and one "destroyed" (whatever that means) would satisfy this description.
Not to say that there wasn't damage done; but the stats you give are clearly designed to look bad rather than to be informative.
I own property in some of the “rougher” areas of Chicago. Yes, the pandemic was hard and yes, it had some effects. But “burned down”? Come on, not in the ballpark, not even in the same sport.
As an independent voter, it's obvious why. When you become a member of one of these two parties, you're part of the team, and generally you're going to assume the best of your team's intentions, their media coverage and so on. And you'll think the worst of the other side's intentions, media, and so on. I think plenty of both sides' positions are valid and others completely fucking insane.
It's not painful, and everyone's been hearing it since it was ongoing. But the extent and severity of it was also greatly exaggerated for political purposes.
I lived near one of the areas that got a ton of media attention. Comparing what a certain breed of pundits were saying about it with what I could plainly see with my own two eyes showed that the pundits were mostly talking nonsense.
I'm not saying that there was no property damage or unrest. There most certainly was. but it was far more limited in area, and far less intense, than many were describing.
"Cities are burning" is one of those absurd things. Nothing even close to that happened.
I think some people have an incentive to exaggerate it for political reasons.
My father believes that the entire country is embroiled in an unmitigated crime wave because he gets his news from Fox and Youtube. Every time I talk to him he whines about how "the country isn't the same as how I grew up anymore."
This is a man who lives closer to the country than the city. It gives him a justification for turning his brain off and voting the way that he does, because in his mind, he's protecting the nation by preventing what he believes to be the liberal dream: allowing young, black men to run around and commit crimes with reckless abandon to bring about the end of capitalism.
They are overcorrecting for the news media that bizarrely ignored and downplayed the riots. Mostly peaceful was how CNN famously described it while literally standing in front of burning wreckage.
Some buildings were burned down in riots but not whole cities. What people haven’t noticed is that this phenomenon has largely run its course. When Tyre Nichols was killed by the police in Memphis this year the police immediately fired the offending officers and… no riots!
Many places have gotten rougher, there is the visible disorder in San Francisco but even the small city of Ithaca, NY has seen a large increase in aggressive panhandling. You can plot opioid overdoses on the map and it looks like a pattern of bullets aimed at the needle exchange. People used to think the old African-American neighborhood downtown was “dangerous” (it wasn’t) but rents have gone up, the area has gentrified, and many of the former residents have relocated to smaller towns in the area. Today people are terrified of the large homeless colony by the inlet and the accompanying shopping cart graveyard.
The pedestrian mall downtown for years was decimated by a construction project that went overtime like the construction of a nuclear reactor, then the pandemic hit. It has been bouncing back and is even starting to get more diverse businesses (it just got a clothing store after years without one, a restaurant moved into the site McDonalds vacated 25 years ago, …) but boy there are a lot of head shops that look more lurid then head shops every looked. (You are dealing with bro overdose when you have a strain of weed called “AK-47”.). I never thought I’d see the day when the mayor, the governor, and the head of the business improvement district would hail the opening of a cannabis dispensary as a strategy for economic development.
My guess is that most cities have people telling a similar story today.
You lost me at the last part where it seemed like you were blaming it all on cannabis dispensaries and a strain of weed called “AK-47” - what is bro overdose btw?
A single data point from my perspective - live in a “city”, sure things gotten rougher since the pandemic, but it’s all alive. My direct family lives in bigger cities (New York, Toronto), and even though things are not the best, people are having fun, enjoying their lives. Some things are getting better, other stuff not so much.
Won’t really entertain your views on weed, since that’s just practically doesn’t pan out. We’ve had it federally legal here for years now, society hasn’t changed at all because of it.
