I lived in San Francisco for the past seven years, but moved to Missoula, Montana because living in the city and even surrounding places like Oakland, South Bay was increasingly way too expensive. I count myself lucky that I am self-employed and work in an industry that I can easily do remote work as the job prospects in Missoula mostly center around low-wage service work.
At the end of the day, I moved to Missoula so I can do my part as a millennial and start buying diamonds again.
Are you afraid that you won't be able to find quality remote work at some point? As much as I'd love to go far off into the woods, my job prospects - even as a confirmed, life-long remote employee - are so much better being close to an urban center with solid transportation connections to major cities.
I work remotely for Bay Area startups. Have for the past three years, been consulting for six (lived in SF prior).
The burden of trust always falls on you, the developer. So you offer concessions to mitigate risk and hustle in the beginning to establish trust:
0) Reach out directly to the prospective job. Show them how you can make a remote arrangement work.
1) Offer a short term contract up front - if you're not "a good fit for each other" the terms allow either party to walk with little notice.
2) Offer to fly out to meet the team personally (most other prospective engineers won't do this). Factor this cost into your rate and _do not_ bother them with additional travel expenses. Tell them you'll "foot the bill".
2a) Give them a single invoice with one number - make it easy for them to pay you.
3) When you've finally joined the team remotely, quickly offer up cosmetic suggestions on PR's, open up new PRs to improve the on-boarding documentation, tackle a couple of simple stories and get a PR out within a few days.
4) Get the senior devs to do walk-throughs of the code on Slack. When you encounter something semi-difficult that Google can't answer, that would probably take you a couple of days to unravel but a senior dev already knows, _call_ them on slack. Swallow your pride. Make a call.
5) Goes without saying - don't miss the standups. If you were in the office, it's easy to see that you're doing something else. When you're 1500 miles away, especially in the beginning, nightmares of the remote dev going MIA kick in quick.
Some of the startups in SF are pretty small, just ramping up in terms of head counts and may not have someone in charge to deal with travel logistics (you could be the first remote dev ever).
If you're trying to get a signal regarding whether the company is going to pay you and pay on time, request a tighter payment schedule, e.g. net 10. That reduces the risk a bit on your side (you won't end up working for two months for free) and isn't much different on their end.
I wouldn't say Missoula is far off into the woods, but maybe that's just where you want to be; sorry if I misunderstood you.
I think about remote work drying up often, but I think if remote work dried up for me it would mean there was a major shift in the industry, so I don't think anyone would be safe from that.
Being near an urban center would mean that you could possibly pound the pavement for a new job in a major city a lot easier. If the industry changes massively, will being near an urban center mean there will still be a lot of jobs there? Maybe? Maybe not.
Hey Neighbor! Let me know if you're interested in a beer or networking in the area. Hellgate Venture network is a great place to meet other tech oriented people in the area.
