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Politicians and economists lament that certain alpha regions — SF, LA, NYC, Boston, Toronto, London, Paris — attract all the best jobs while becoming repellently expensive, reducing economic mobility and contributing to further bifurcation between haves and have-nots. But why don't the best jobs move elsewhere?
Of course, many of them can't. The average financier in NYC or London (until Brexit annihilates London's banking industry, of course...) would be laughed out of the office, and not invited back, if they told their boss they wanted to henceforth work from Chiang Mai.
But this isn't true of (much of) the software field. The average web/app developer might have such a request declined; but they would not be laughed at, or fired. The demand for good developers greatly outstrips supply, and in this era of Skype and Slack, there's nothing about software development that requires meatspace interactions.
[...]Some people will tell you that remote teams are inherently less effective and productive than localized ones, or that "serendipitous collisions" are so important that every employee must be forced to the same physical location every day so that these collisions can be manufactured. These people are wrong, as long as the team in question is small — on the order of handfuls, dozens or scores, rather than hundreds or thousands — and flexible.
Because the feedlot isn't hiring for Ruby?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday April 05 2017, @01:10AM (10 children)
The good IT jobs are in a couple of big cities because that is where all of the interesting tech companies are. The tech companies are there because that is where the VC is and VC has enough pitches from local people and they like that they can drop in and check up without airfare involved to bother with people who aren't smart enough to figure out why they aren't getting funded out in flyover country. Hot IT companies like to be able to show the VC their weird tatted / pierced spergy 'talent' to show them they have 'real' hard core coders. That leaves the boring stuff at boring corporate accounts for potential remote work but it is being offshored and H1B replaced as quickly as possible and it is hard to live anywhere in CONUS and compete with India once you surrender the advantages from being in meatspace sitting in a cube.
It really is that simple, it is about the VC preferences. All the talk about other reasons why to be in the city are noise against that VC signal.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @01:22AM (5 children)
h1b/offshore you get what you pay for. The last couple of projects I worked on we used them quite a bit. We finally got tired of shit code, and randomly rotating people with 0 consistency in the replacement. We would h1b only if we really could not find anyone. That was pretty rare. We brought all projects back in because the contractors kept dragging it along and delivering crap quality. You get what you pay for. We needed quality and got crap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @01:43AM (4 children)
Then the problem may be that the people doing the hiring have absolutely no idea what they're doing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @02:10AM
We went with the big offshore companies and a few small ones. The contractor companies do. not. care. If your project eats it then 'oh well'. They may even comp your money back. But you have lost 6 months of time with nothing but a kiss and a promise. We tried pair programming them, intense waterfall, agile, 24/7 rotation monitoring, micromanaging, everything. We could not get these companies to deliver quality. We would have to re-QA the whole project and double the dev time. We gave up on it. It may work for others but it did not for us. Everything internal was doing good we were able to manage that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @04:13AM (2 children)
I think this is the consequence of the professionalization of "business" itself as a thing. MBAs hire MBAs because of a culture of this being the thing to do. And then suddenly you have people making all the decisions believe that programmers are all, more or less, equal and that hiring 10 programmers to do one job means it can get done 10x as fast. I think we're starting to move away from this but it's going to be a slow process. These type of people are so ingrained at the executive level that phasing them out is not something that's going to happen quickly. For instance SpaceX, working on the most bare bones of resources, has already started to overshadow Boeing - a company that had near a century of experience and net income that dwarfed SpaceX's entire worth. This [wikipedia.org] was Boeing's CEO during their downfall. This [wikipedia.org] is their CEO (and chairman) now. They went from a marketing and "businessman" to an aerospace engineer and, lo and behold, the company somehow seems to have been suddenly starting to shift in the direction of progress again. By contrast this [wikipedia.org] is still Lockheed Martin's CEO. I'm sure we can expect ever more great things from them... like the F-35! SpaceX of course being run by Elon Musk - a physicist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @12:49PM (1 child)
From the wikipedia article about LM's CEO :
What the fuck is a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration???
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @05:02PM
A load of B.S.?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @02:22AM (3 children)
Remember that "interesting tech companies" isn't just pure-software places. If anything, those places are less interesting.
Software gets interesting when it operates equipment that can kill people, intentionally or not. This means everything from medical implants to ICBMs. Bugs that cause funny-looking text on a web site are not interesting. Bugs that cause funny-looking injuries are interesting. Everything is more meaningful when people can die.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday April 05 2017, @02:52AM (2 children)
Somehow I suspect the people writing software for things that kill people really don't like the idea of remote work. Security with all the work in a physically secure building is hard enough, security with some guy in a remote city working from a home where God only knows who is wandering in/out and could gain access is a nightmare. How many people (not named Clinton) have a SCIF in their home? Then there is the link.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @05:06AM (1 child)
It took me hours to realize that you were assuming that these jobs would either be in the well-known tech spots (and you'd be rural) or that you'd stay in a well-known tech spot and work remotely.
These life-and-death jobs are often outside the tech spots, and you are expected to move.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @09:08PM
Hours? Um...do you need something better to do?