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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday April 04 2017, @11:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the flock-that dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @04:13AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @04:13AM (#489006)

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @12:49PM (#489100)

    From the wikipedia article about LM's CEO :

    Hewson was born in Junction City, Kansas. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in business administration and her Master of Arts degree in economics from the University of Alabama. She also attended the Columbia Business School and Harvard Business School executive development programs.[3]

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @05:02PM (#489217)

      What the fuck is a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration???

      A load of B.S.?