[HN Gopher] Americans have never been so unwilling to relocate f...
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Americans have never been so unwilling to relocate for a new job
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 350 points
Date : 2023-05-17 11:37 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| There is a simple solution to this: cover relocation expenses for
| new hires. As wacky as this sounds, it was standard practice to
| pay for relocating engineers. That's how my family moved so much
| when I was growing up. During the 80s, companies started cutting
| back, so that by the 90s, only managers & executives were getting
| paid relocation.
|
| I've been approached by recruiters trying to hire developers in
| smaller communities. I know it is hard for them when this is the
| only employer (outside of retail or fast food) in that "city"
| because if things don't turn out, you have to move. Moving is
| expensive. When you're in your early 20s, everything fits in the
| back of a pickup truck. If you have family, then things get
| complicated enough that relocation becomes a large project.
| cptskippy wrote:
| I think this is just part of the equation.
|
| Begin crazy tinfoil hat rant...
|
| Companies have been driven by short term returns for so long
| that they've completely eroded the trust of everyone.
|
| For the last 40 years companies have been renaming compensation
| as "benefits" and then reducing those "benefits" under the
| guise of tightening the belt so they can survive the endless
| wave of recessions. They have gradually whittled down and
| eliminated almost all forms of compensation at all levels.
| Pensions became matching retirement plans, then matching up to
| 10%, 8%, 6%, and 4%. Healthcare use to be free to employees,
| now it's paid and the cost goes up significantly every year.
| Companies sold their offices and moved into leased properties
| where employees pay for parking but got a stipend until a
| subsequent recession eliminated that stipend.
|
| These cuts have all been gradual over the decades and new
| people entering the work force are unaware and assume this is
| how it's always been and don't question it. At the same time
| older employees are forced to accept the concessions because
| they're minor and it's easier to take a minor cut in
| compensation than find a new job.
|
| We have reached the point where most employees are no longer
| fairly compensated for their work and have no sense of job
| security or loyalty. The pandemic amplified this because it
| forced businesses to enact policies they claimed would be
| damaging AND then miraculously reported record productivity and
| profits. Now they're trying to roll back those policies.
| Employees see long commutes and increased expenses for not real
| benefit and are rejecting it.
|
| So why the rollback? Most of this rollback is being driven by
| Private Equity firms who are heavily invested in commercial
| rel-estate and without staff in offices that rel-estate is
| tanking. These firms have been purchasing private companies and
| then steering them to lease properties they own for decades.
| This is also why Private Equity started investing in
| residential rel-estate, they're double dipping. If employees
| have to go into the office then they need to live near that
| office.
|
| Post pandemic, these companies reported record profits but
| those gains are dwindling. To maintain these gains they've
| driven inflation to the breaking point. But inflation isn't
| sustainable so it's back to cutting costs. What's the biggest
| cost? Employees and with record low unemployment you have high
| wages. So now we have layoffs as a way to sabotage the labor
| market and drive down costs.
|
| This is just part of the cycle the rich use to extract wealth
| from us.
| rjbwork wrote:
| >Begin crazy tinfoil hat rant...
|
| And then you proceed to describe the exact situation that has
| been unfolding. Capital always seeks to achieve the highest
| returns possible by any means necessary. All of these things
| are just the logical steps a party interested in profit above
| everything else would take. No conspiracies needed, just cold
| brutal profit seeking behavior.
| m348e912 wrote:
| >So why the rollback? Most of this rollback is being driven
| by Private Equity firms who are heavily invested in
| commercial rel-estate and without staff in offices that rel-
| estate is tanking.
|
| I agree that a lot of the pressure for the return to office
| is coming from investment firms that risk losing their shirt
| in commercial real estate if it doesn't happen. These firms
| have a lot of influence at the top of major companies. There
| seems to be a battle underway between the working class and
| the investment/management class over remote work long term.
| It is interesting to watch.
| cptskippy wrote:
| It's gotten to the point where they're making up stories
| about day drinking and drug use.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-13/remote-
| wo...
|
| If that's the case, drug tests and breathalyzers are
| cheaper than office space.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Or more simply, hire remotely.
|
| I have laughed off more than few recruiters, all who have tried
| and failed to hire for a somewhat niche IT job an hour north of
| Grand Rapids, MI over the last year
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Grand Rapids, MI has a surprisingly strong tech startup scene
| darth_avocado wrote:
| But relocation expenses are covered in a lot of jobs, yet
| people don't relocate. Beyond the early career moves, it is
| extremely hard for people to move. It goes beyond just
| financial hurdles. It's not easy for example to move your kids
| to a new city and new schools.
| itake wrote:
| If I sold my house right now, I'd have to realize $150k loss.
|
| If I were to buy a new comparable house, I would pay double
| the mortgage rate.
|
| The highest relo package post tax I've received is $32k ($50k
| pretax, but in California)
| alistairSH wrote:
| _But relocation expenses are covered in a lot of jobs_
|
| Citation? Maybe for lots of jobs that require unique skills,
| but the average office drone isn't getting relocation
| expenses.
| the_only_law wrote:
| IME sometimes you have to ask for it. Last time I moved I
| was working for a big soulless F500 type company.
|
| When I applied to the job there was a note saying that they
| would not offer relocation expenses. I was one of two
| people hired into the team at the time for similar roles,
| and the other guy told me he managed to get relocation
| money just by asking
| mleo wrote:
| More families have two incomes and relocating requires
| finding two jobs.
| stevemk14ebr wrote:
| Social connections being lost is not something easy to
| compensate for. Those often take a _long_ time to grow
| organically as well.
| clnq wrote:
| If you can ever compensate for them at all. It's basically
| impossible to make lifelong friends after 35-ish. Maybe
| that's why all the seniors I know are inflexible about
| relocation, among the many other reasons. Too much damage for
| a job you might not even like (who knows, it can go either
| way despite best attempts).
| tired-turtle wrote:
| During COVID, I made friends who are 10/25/40ish years
| older than me. I firmly believe we will be lifelong
| friends, i.e. til death do us apart.
|
| Lasting friendships form in mysterious ways. You need only
| be open to the possibility.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Or never come back.
| elijaht wrote:
| Everyone I know that has relocated (~10 people, largely SWEs)
| has gotten a stipend to relocate, including myself.
|
| To me, that's not the big barrier. The social/emotional cost of
| relocation, along with the risk of job loss, is the main
| driver.
| itake wrote:
| As others have stated, that stipend would not cover doubling
| of mortgage (due to high interest rates). That stipend also
| gets clawed back if they pay you off within 1-2 years.
|
| If I sold my house right now, I'd realize a $150k loss + have
| to pay double the mortgage rate. I've never had a relo
| package above $50k ($37k after tax)
| elijaht wrote:
| Sure. Was responding to the claim that no one was getting a
| relocation stipend
| snarf21 wrote:
| This is not a solution in a system where your position can be
| cut after you've sold your house but before you start your
| first day. What you describe is that a main way to get a
| promotion used to be to move. I doubt that is really the case
| for most people anymore. Additionally, if you move to the wrong
| place you will be moving again when the CEO runs the company
| into the ground doing buybacks instead of growing the company.
| dsm4ck wrote:
| If the new hire has a spouse that can't work remote, the moving
| costs are nothing compared to the spouse's loss of income.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Or just make a law that says "if you fire a recently relocated
| employee, you owe him 2 years salary".
|
| That way firms that aren't sure about relocating someone will
| not do it. Firms with some confidence in their business will
| not have a problem.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| The unintended consequences of this are pretty large. I just
| wouldn't hire anyone who fit that law because of how onerous
| it is.
| licebmi__at__ wrote:
| A possible solution might be a remote probation period,
| then if you still need relocation, you will be subject to
| the law.
|
| You get to hire and fire if the relationship doesn't work,
| but if you're still adamant on forcing a relocation then
| the risk is shared.
| grumple wrote:
| And that's fine. You'd hire locally, you'd move the
| company, or you'd allow remote work. But you definitely
| wouldn't fire someone you just hired and forced to move.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| It costs nothing amortized over the hundred hires you
| wouldn't fire in the first month. If you fire often, this
| law is good to stop you from doing that.
| wanttocomment wrote:
| This kind of thing is why we have such long interview cycles
| and strong bias against false positives
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| ...because a false negative is so much worse than a false
| positive.
|
| I'll take less opportunities for more stability. Many
| people would. That's what this article is all about. Better
| for most to have less that you can rely on than more one
| year and less the other and no sense of calm.
| wanttocomment wrote:
| You may be willing to make the tradeoff, but you should
| acknowledge the downsides.
|
| The most extreme example is in academia where they get a
| lot of stability in exchange for an excruciating job hunt
| and interview process. And if they don't like the job,
| they are stuck.
|
| I would rather have a world where we can take a chance on
| someone, then not. If you have all your ducks in a
| polished row, and look and act the right way, maybe you
| prefer protection against that.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The consequence is firms won't hire relocated employees.
| Which is strictly worse
| clnq wrote:
| Good. They will hire remote or go the way of the dinosaurs
| they are.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Or instead of _this_ law, we make stock buybacks illegal
| again. Then, companies flush with profit, have to take better
| care of the employees they bring on.
| welshwelsh wrote:
| I don't support that. Stock buybacks are a great thing;
| they allow companies to return excess cash to investors,
| helping ensure that capital is allocated efficiency across
| the whole economy.
|
| Otherwise companies are pressured to spend money just
| because they happen to have money, even if they don't have
| anything productive to spend it on. That's not a good
| thing.
| delfinom wrote:
| Plenty of companies do cover relocation expenses. In fact
| defense contractors who spent decades dodging taxes by moving
| facilities to bumfuck nowhere rural areas are so desperate
| they've been ponying up large signing bonuses on top. The
| problem is many of the companies complaining nobody wants to
| relocate is because they are located somewhere that's a career
| deadend. They may be the only employer in the area or there's
| barely more. The cost of living may also be lower but the
| quality of life may not be so great too.
|
| Boomers put up with this shit. Every other generation is
| actually prioritizing quality of life long term.
|
| Constantly relocating generally isn't fun, even if it's paid
| for.
| TimPC wrote:
| Sort of. Most common relocation packages vest over two years
| and cover some costs. Only the very best packages compensate
| you for the loss of money on your house in the market and
| I've yet to see any packages that compensate for inflation-
| adjusted loss. Most of the time if you get fired 6 months
| after relocating you owe the company 75-100% of your
| relocation package depending on the vesting terms.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _defense contractors who spent decades dodging taxes by
| moving facilities to bumfuck nowhere rural areas_
|
| This isn't why they do it. Getting the vote of that bumfuck
| district's Congressperson, who is safely gerrymandered and
| thus tenured and on powerful committees, is.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| 18 years ago, we moved cross country for a job for my wife that
| was already planned to be eliminated in a few months by the
| person doing the hiring. To take advantage of the job
| opportunity, we had to rent out our house. Renting cost us a lot
| of money due to problems with the renters and no one but me to
| come back to deal with them, even though I had a contractor
| friend do a number of things. Then we had to move back. An
| expensive and inappropriate experience.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Working at a well known big tech company that recently mandated a
| return to office.
|
| Despite them playing "hardball" with RTO, the fact is that our
| teams are already distributed and it's telling that they aren't
| mandating we all move to be colocated. I'll begrudgingly try to
| commute in a few days of the week to work remotely in the local
| office, but if management tells me to move coasts I'm out. I've
| got options here.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| There are zero guarantees as an employee in this country. Why
| would anyone uproot their entire life for that? What if I move my
| children to a new school and sell my home, and then lose my job
| six months later? It's a terrible deal.
|
| Remote work levels the playing field significantly for employees.
| japanuspus wrote:
| I once heard an anecdote that during the industrial revolution in
| the UK, "mills" were build out in the country where hydropower
| was available and the mill owners would also build homes to sell
| to workers. When recession hit and the mills downscaled, the
| workers were forced to sell at loss in order to relocate -- and
| the mill owners could resell the homes at profit when business
| picked back up.
|
| Quickly Googling, this might be related to the Lancashire Cotton
| Famine [0].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_Cotton_Famine
| expertentipp wrote:
| Here is the idea. Instead of relocating specialists which you
| need, relocate sociopaths holding to their positions at every
| cost. Relocate them away, make them start they life from scratch
| including learning local language and solving the usual paradox
| of being unable to open a bank account.
| dathinab wrote:
| not just in the US
|
| If you life anywhere where there had been a large increase in
| cost of rent and/or housing moving can be a _major and long term_
| financial burden even if you ignore the direct cost and
| complexity of moving.
|
| I case of property, especially if not payed of, it can mean a
| money loss you might take years to recover from and in case of
| rent it might include a non small increase in monthly cost.
|
| This can easily make the difference between having a decent live
| and scrapping by.
|
| And this isn't even including all the other negative effects,
| like getting further away from friends and family (and support
| networks), children needing to change school, you needing a new
| baby sitter, etc. But especially very low income families often
| _are deeply depended_ on such factors.
|
| *Moving is luxury, at least with today economy.*
|
| At the same time not moving to get a job is also luxury, so I
| guess people with low income are just majorly screwed.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| I like the idea of 'mega-regions', especially now that
| remote/hybrid work means you may not have to commute every day,
| but might still need to meet physically fairly regularly. Each
| mega-region has sufficient mass and density to meet the
| 'concentration of talent' requirement for interesting stuff to
| happen, while providing different living densities within it for
| different lifestyles (urban, suburban, etc). Key is a
| comprehensive public transport system within each mega-region.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaregions_of_the_United_Stat...
| digitalsushi wrote:
| Mega-regions are large enough that, were I told to meet
| physically within one, the suffering of getting to somewhere
| else within one would be about equivalent to getting to
| completely different one. These are huge!
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm about a 1.5-2 hour trip in at rush hour into the major
| city about 50 miles away. (Not sure why all these people
| supposedly not in their offices seem to be driving in and out
| in cars; it's actually gotten worse post-pandemic.) It's not
| _that_ much easier /quicker than flying to a city an hour or
| two away. I certainly wouldn't do either multiple times a
| week long term unless I had absolutely no choice.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I'm a 2 hour train ride from a major city. I almost took a
| job that would have me commuting in twice a week. Since the
| train has good WIFI, it really didn't seem like a bad
| option. More than twice a week would have been
| unacceptable, and so would have been driving that distance.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Public transit is a must.
|
| A 1 hour drive is a pain in the ass. A 1 hour train ride
| can be a nice time to read or work.
| ghaff wrote:
| I actually have a relatively good transit option. It's
| still 4 hours out of my day, isn't really practical if
| there's an evening event, and locks me into a schedule
| that usually involves getting up around 5:30. I do
| sometimes use it but it's not a panacea
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think if I had a 2 hour ride, I'd need to get enough
| work done on the train to justify leaving the office a
| bit early. That is pretty rough, even if it is a nice
| ride.
| ghaff wrote:
| And it's not even as neat as a 2 hour ride to the office.
| It's take a short drive to the train station with a
| little bit of buffer--because the next train will be an
| hour later. Take the train. Take the subway where I
| probably won't have a seat. Walk about 15 minutes.
|
| So it's a pretty reasonable transit system, albeit with
| reduced schedules (and eliminated express trains) since
| COVID. But it's still a haul to go in for a day even
| though it's a pretty reasonable 1 hour drive outside of
| busy times.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I have a similar, but not as bad, situation here. About a
| 20 minute walk to the bus station. If I go very early, I
| hit the reduced schedule and so I could wait up to an
| hour (typically less, that's the max). Then the ride is
| around a half hour.
|
| These sort of transit systems seem reasonable-ish in
| comparison to, say, the rest of the US (if that is where
| you are from--it is the only standard I have to compare
| against). But it is actually not really practical if it
| wipes out 4 hours of your day. I mean, assuming your are
| some sort of programmer (since this is hackernews), then
| your time is probably worth around $40-$50 an hour at
| least... $200 a day should be able to buy a better option
| somehow.
|
| I like my trip: it is good to take a walk anyway, there's
| a nice coffee shop near the bus stop, and I usually get a
| seat so I can do something work related... but even still
| is is just on the cusp of not really being practical, and
| I'm probably giving it a mental discount for ideological
| affinity.
| ghaff wrote:
| A (long) time ago, I commuted into the city (Boston)
| maybe a couple days/week on average for a job I had for
| about 18 months. (Took about 90 minutes each way--in that
| case, I could just walk to my office from the train
| station.) It was sort of tolerable because it wasn't
| every day. But I still don't think it would have been
| sustainable long-term.
| lotu wrote:
| I could see doing trips in one of these regions same day if
| I'm willing to get up super early and get back super late or
| with a single night stay if I'm not. It sucks but you can do
| it, where as you really need a whole day each way just for
| traveling between mega regions.
| CalRobert wrote:
| If I can do it on a train in ~6 hours I'm pretty happy. If I
| have to get on a plane I'm miserable. DC to Boston (or
| Portland ME at a stretch), London/Paris/Amsterdam, etc. come
| to mind as comparable regions.
| throw-ru-938 wrote:
| You probably don't hate planes, you hate the TSA. What's to
| stop a populist gov't from mandating TSA-style "security"
| on the railway?
| lesuorac wrote:
| A train doesn't go off its rails into the Pentagon.
|
| TSA does actually (very rarely) check passengers before
| letting them board trains. I think I've seen it about
| once when I used to take a train roughly 2/wk for a year.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I had some TSA guy's dog randomly sniff my bag in the
| mid-naughties at San Clemente once. I think he was hoping
| he'd find weed.
| CalRobert wrote:
| No, I hate planes. They destroy Earth, they're unpleasant
| (though once you're cruising they're OK I guess), they
| land miles and miles away from where I actually want to
| be, and my folding bike (a Brompton) is to big to be a
| carryon for a plane, but is fine for a train.
|
| When travelling as a family a train is nice. We can
| linger in the observation car, hang out in the snack car
| (RIP bar car and dining car :-( ), and enjoy the scenery.
|
| I suspect the US will indeed move towards more and more
| restrictive security on trains (there's money to be made
| in pointless security theater after all!) But, as noted
| elsewhere, trains have the advantage of predictable
| motion (pretty hard to crash a train into a building!)
| and being able to stop anywhere without killing everyone
| on board.
| placesalt wrote:
| I haven't spent much time there, but the Front Range region
| did really strike me as a contiguous city/zone when I was
| there. I think it's because it's so narrow.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The only one of those megaregions that's really a tenable
| megaregion is the Northeast Corridor, which is (unsurprisingly)
| the genesis of the term in the first place. Traveling from DC
| to Boston, there's not really any point where you escape to
| rural areas, and several metropolitan areas blend to the point
| where drawing lines between them doesn't make sense (Baltimore-
| Washington in particular).
|
| Outside of the Northeast, the megaregions don't really play
| out. Chicago, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area are all cases where
| you have a dominant MSA with surrounding MSAs that are
| essentially dependent on the core MSA, with continuous sprawl
| between them. But it's not entirely the same dynamic as the
| Northeast region, although in terms of having a headquarters
| that people can occasionally visit in person, it works. The
| Gulf Coast, Cascadia, and Front Range megaregions that are
| identified are, quite frankly, fantasy that feels like an
| attempt to stuff as many people into megaregions as possible.
| tsukikage wrote:
| In our brave new globalised outsourced world, teams are
| distributed across the planet and I communicate with the people I
| work most closely with via the internet.
|
| If I spend my working day on Zoom and Google Meet, why the heck
| does it matter where I physically am?
| brightball wrote:
| I've been asked to relocate by multiple companies and probably
| would have if not for my wife owning a successful business where
| we live. That was something that people understood it seems.
|
| I remember being so surprised years ago when a recruiter couldn't
| understand why I would fly up to NY for a week at a time and then
| fly home every weekend. I know there are people who do it, I just
| can't imagine it.
| trgn wrote:
| Most people actually like their families. Many people have come
| to that realization with the pandemic.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| I knew a guy who flew from Boston to London every weekend, to
| see his wife. They were both being paid dumptrucks of cash,
| though.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| The us was exceptional by circumstances, and now they become just
| another xerox of europe.
| msufan wrote:
| This is partly about interest rates. People are locked into 3%
| mortgage rates and can't justify walking away from that to get a
| mortgage with a 6%+ rate.
| x3sphere wrote:
| Yeah that's not surprising... to move many would have to give up
| a 2-3% mortgage. Unless the pay bump from relocating covers the
| extra I'd be spending per month with 6% interest rate and then
| some, it doesn't seem worth the risk.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Americans have never been so unwilling to turn their world inside
| out for an employer who's main priority is hitting the quarterly
| numbers, even if it means laying people off.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Relocation in unappealing because companies will let you go in a
| blink of an eye. With the recent tech layoffs, many people who
| left their lives to relocate for a job were let go even before
| they started. You experience that once and you'd almost never
| relocate in your life, especially now that remote work is
| becoming a commonly available option.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > specially now that remote work is becoming a commonly
| available option.
|
| I said this somewhere else in the thread but repeating here -
| remote work is only a short term solution and a big long term
| threat. Once all the tools are processes are established to
| deal with remote work, your job will be instantly shipped to a
| cheaper country - Canada, Latin America, Eastern Europe or
| India. American workers should realize that remote work is not
| going to be like 2020-21 forever. Shareholder class is
| ruthless.
| 88913527 wrote:
| If the consumer can't afford the widgets produced by the
| companies owned by the shareholder class, there goes the
| revenue.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| Tell me again how that worked out for our manufacturing
| sector. Walmarts thrived, workers are poor, governments
| picked up the tab for their workers' safety nets,
| "manufacturing jobs" became a boogeyman for the successful
| presidential bid by Trump. That's the future we will be
| repeating on steroids by gutting one of the remaining
| ladder to upper middle class.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Remote work has been the reality for years now and yet this
| hasn't happened. If anything it's the opposite and companies
| are focusing on more in person workers.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| It hasn't really been a reality the way it is today. During
| covid, we were forced to implement norms and tools for
| remote working (like Zoom). Also, we learned about
| replacing an expensive worker for a cheaper one one at a
| time. Earlier, there used to be entire teams in some remote
| location, so it was similar to having 2 islands (one large,
| one small) with a bridge which was crossed may be once or
| twice a year during annual trips to HQ. Now with one-new-
| person-at-a-time, teams don't lose productivity but over
| time, American workers are replaced with cheaper ones.
|
| Source: seeing it myself in my current company. Also
| remembers: shareholder class is ruthless. If I can see
| this, they are seeing and acting on it as well.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > It hasn't really been a reality the way it is today
|
| Holy hell you seem to be spamming this around.
|
| It may not have been a reality for you and the company
| that you work for. It has been a reality for a lot of
| people and none of the 'new factors' that you used in
| your comments to argue that 'this time it is different'
| are actually new. There isnt anything new about this
| remote work. A lot of companies were already doing it way
| before, including outsourcing overseas. The new situation
| and trends do not change that - in fact, it makes it
| easier for American devs to compete by avoiding living in
| expensive metropolises like SF and NY. Which is helpful
| to those who live in such metropolises too since it would
| put a downward pressure on the price of everything there.
| Something which the real estate sector would definitely
| hate, I gather. Hence the pressure on the major
| corporations regarding RTO from that industry and the
| politicians they back...
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Sure, it makes sense but that relocation is happening
| with or without me and i'd rather have a remote job and
| spend time with my family instead of commuting. This is
| basically asking "would you rather eat cake now and have
| your cake taken away later or choose not to eat the cake
| that's just sitting there and have it taken away later
| regarless?". I choose to eat the cake however ephemeral
| it may be.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| Or you can delay the inevitable by making it hard to
| transition to remote. You can contribute in ways big and
| small. Have that cake supply flowing for a few more
| decades. And if enough people resist and companies give
| up on fully remote, you don't even have to worry about
| losing those cakes.
| cwp wrote:
| Yes and no. They tried that in the 90s and it didn't work
| out. It turns out timezones, language and culture matter. So
| yes, remote work will mean that US white collar workers will
| have to compete with workers in other countries, but that's
| not impossible. We may find that yes, that drags down
| compensation in the US, but it also pulls up compensation in
| the rest of the world, and there's just a wider range, more
| developers available in general and more coding happens as
| software continues to eat the world. How AI figure into this
| is anybody's guess - don't believe anyone who claims to know.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Can remote work be like 2012-2022 forever though?
| jacobkg wrote:
| Indeed. Not sure why more US-based engineers that are
| staunchly pro remote work don't seem concerned about this.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Because it is a non-factor:
|
| Moving to a cheaper location allows them to cut a major %
| of the salary requirement due to living costs. Companies
| are already saving billions by creating satellite offices
| in cheaper states and providing remote work in that state
| or region - some even without requiring any days in the
| office.
|
| When the salary requirement is reduced by cutting out the
| cost of living like that, what ends up being the salary
| minimum is not so much different from what the overseas dev
| would want. Its not like top talent in that country will
| work for the American companies for dimes so that American
| shareholders can have a payday. You either pay that dev
| something that will make it worth for him to not go for a
| major local company and lose the social status and perks
| associated with it (very important in many local cultures),
| or he will just take a more traditional career route and
| work for the local giants.
|
| And its not like sloppy copy-paste work from juniors who
| accept $10-15/hour when they start their career was not
| available before. If any company that is worth its salt was
| not able to run a major tech business with such juniors
| before, they wont be able to run it now either.
|
| Therefore what remote work in the US hurts is basically the
| outrageous real estate sector and its margins. Which is why
| they put pressure on companies for RTO through the
| politicians it backs...
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > what ends up being the salary minimum is not so much
| different from what the overseas dev would want
|
| This is FUD. Based on both qualitative data - my company,
| which pays Canadians much less than the cheapest US
| workers, and Latin Americans less than Canadians - and
| quantitative comparison of median total comps:
|
| SFBA: 230K https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-
| engineer/locations/san-fra...
|
| Chicago: 138K https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-
| engineer/locations/greater... chicago-area
|
| Toronto: 99K https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-
| engineer/locations/greater...
|
| Sao Paulo: 39K https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-
| engineer/locations/greater...
|
| Bogota: 26K https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-
| engineer/locations/colombi...
|
| American workers, who think they can live in Midwest on
| SV salaries are delusional. If they think they can live
| in Midwest on 80% of SV salaries, time to know that it's
| not 2021 anymore. Your competition is with Toronto
| (proficiency of English, cultural compatibility etc) and
| depending on what your company wants, you are competing
| with Bogota and Sao Paulo.
|
| > Therefore what remote work in the US hurts is basically
| the outrageous real estate sector and its margins.
|
| Tell that to my American colleagues who were by and large
| replaced by foreign colleagues in the last year.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Your qualitative data refutes your own argument: Leaving
| aside that you are using the average wages as a
| comparison, so that the wages of the guy in Sao Paulo or
| Bogota cannot be directly compared to - holy hell - the
| salary of a guy in San Fran, the numbers outright say
| that there isnt so much difference in between sending a
| job to Toronto vs sending it to some underutilized
| American state. To boot, the Midwest is not the only
| American region and the midwest is not so poor in
| technology sector, especially Texas. And amazingly,
| populated and highly talent-rich India is missing from
| that list, a top outsourcing location, and instead a
| random Bogota is in. Why not pick Aleut Islands - the
| average pay of a dev there would be much, much lower
| there due to the scarce presence of devs.
|
| So who do you think that you will employ in Bogota and
| how many of them are there? All the top-tier talent that
| those countries have historically been producing before
| was flowing into places like San Fran or other tech hubs
| as immigrants. You think that if the kind of remote work
| offshoring that you imagine happens, you will be able to
| grab ~200,000 people from top talent tier in those
| countries? A number way above the population of many
| cities of those countries?
|
| No. In such a situation, either the top immigrant talent
| now in SF will flow back to their homeland, still not
| reducing the price of the talent in those countries
| because there is no way in hell the education systems of
| those countries can churn out hundreds of thousands of
| tech graduates a year. So basically its another case of
| relocation of talent - this time, the immigrant talent
| goes back to their own countries to work for the same
| companies from there just like the American talent goes
| back to another US state to work for the same companies
| from there.
|
| Take India as an example instead - a country that can
| actually educate that much talent and already has a large
| tech sector that is not only advanced but segments of it
| were actually geared to do the very specific thing that
| you are prophesizing doom about - getting the outsourced
| jobs of richer countries.
|
| Did that change anything? Has the average pay in SF
| constantly increased over the last 2 decades or not? Has
| India been able to get American companies to outsource
| all development jobs?
|
| ...
|
| Long story short, you are prophesizing doom about
| something that was already prophesized to happen, and
| just did not. Its not that American companies were not
| able to outsource to Bogota or Trinidad or Tobago before.
| They were. And it did not change anything. It seems like
| the already present reality of remote work stayed outside
| your radar for whatsover reason. But it existed, and it
| did not cause doom.
|
| > Tell that to my American colleagues who were by and
| large replaced by foreign colleagues in the last year.
|
| $300k/year salaries and positions in SF may suffer until
| remote work brings down cost of living in the hellish
| real estate landscape and general prices, there is no
| doubt about it.
|
| However I doubt that the loss of such positions are
| related to remote work - all the layoffs that we saw in
| the past year has been due to the companies trying to
| shore up stock prices due to the loss of the zero
| interest economy. Its not like they laid off 200,000
| people and then hired 200,000 remote offshore devs in
| their place...
| RestlessMind wrote:
| I think a lot of workers do see this. My suspicion is that
| the current vocal minority is comprised of: truly smart
| people (10x developers) who will be irreplaceable and liked
| the comfort of remote work during covid, foreign workers
| for whom this is a golden opportunity, useful idiots who
| think 2020-21 is going to be the norm with 150-200K
| packages out of school and 1M TC for 6 years of experience.
| valar_m wrote:
| What do you suggest that a "useful idiot" like myself
| should do?
|
| I read your other comments, and all I see are doomsday
| predictions about us losing our jobs. In another comment
| you said:
|
| > Once all the tools are processes are established to
| deal with remote work, our job will be instantly shipped
| to a cheaper country
|
| What tools and processes do you think are coming that
| will going to make this happen? Like a better version of
| Zoom or something?
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > What do you suggest that a "useful idiot" like myself
| should do?
|
| Seek a cluster of companies which have a culture based on
| in-office work. They are not going to change overnight
| and will be the last ones to replace American workforce
| with foreign ones.
|
| > all I see are doomsday predictions
|
| I agree and maybe that's the psychological effect of
| seeing multiple rounds of layoffs in the last year with
| new headcount only in foreign locales. Also, because when
| I look at how American manufacturing sector declined due
| to outsourcing, how China rose to prominence, how that
| enriched the upper class but shredded the working class,
| how a demagogue like Trump tapped into their resentment
| to gain incredible political power - it is very difficult
| to not connect the dots with what is happening now.
|
| I will be extremely happy if my predictions are proven
| wrong.
| valar_m wrote:
| > Seek a cluster of companies which have a culture based
| on in-office work
|
| Won't those be the first companies to go under if your
| prediction happens and they're left competing with
| overseas remote companies with much lower operating
| costs? Especially given that they're not only paying
| higher US salaries, but also physical office space.
| dv_dt wrote:
| I see far more job remote reqs specifying US only, or time
| zone +/- n hrs limited than worldwide reqs.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| Timezones cover Canada and Latin America. That's where most
| of our new hires are coming from.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Good point on the timezones. Though when they say US
| only, I presume that they're not prepared to do
| international payroll even in the same timezone.
| sleepytimetea wrote:
| I think you make the most valid point... with no trust in the
| stability of the job after relocation, why would people uproot
| their lives.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This is a difference from prior generations. You used to hear
| "the company is moving us to Seattle" but implicit in that is:
|
| - people worked for "the company" for years if not their entire
| careers
|
| - there was little to no fear that you'd get laid off after the
| move
|
| - the company paid your relocation expenses, perhaps also
| bought your old house so you would not have to deal with
| selling it.
|
| - your wife (probably) was a homemaker and did not have to
| worry about finding a new job.
|
| - kids had to go to a new school and make new friends. Tough
| luck, kids didn't dictate what parents decided to do.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's all true to a significant degree. Of course, the
| reverse expectation was that you'd be a "company man" and
| spend your career (or at least a decade or two) at the
| company.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Which many people would be happy to do. Employers are the
| ones that made the first moves on breaking loyalty, not
| employees. The bulk of employees are not looking to make
| moves if they feel they are being treated fairly and
| compensated well.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, a lot of traditional unionized blue collar union
| jobs went overseas. So the employers didn't have a lot of
| control over that.
|
| A lot of jobs also shifted to smaller companies in areas
| like tech and employees wanted to take advantage of
| higher salaries being offered by those firms.
|
| I'm not sure it's a simple case of employers suddenly
| locking employees in. There were a lot of market forces
| that made staying at the same single employee forever
| less attractive from a salary perspective. Sort of a re-
| enforcing cycle. I'm sure economists have more data.
| edgyquant wrote:
| How did employers not have control over hiring overseas
| workers?
| zizee wrote:
| > Well, a lot of traditional unionized blue collar union
| jobs went overseas. So the employers didn't have a lot of
| control over that.
|
| Who exactly was sending these blue collar jobs overseas
| if it was not the employers?
| ghaff wrote:
| Losing business to overseas competition. Which was
| arguably their own fault but happened nonetheless.
| deathanatos wrote:
| I'm happy to send years at a company, if there's a point to
| doing so. But the only means to advancing one's career,
| from what I have seen, is changing jobs.
|
| The flip side of the coin is that it's frustrating as a
| dev: nobody knows anything, when the entire employee base
| flips so often. Middle managers just don't get it, AFAICT.
| imbnwa wrote:
| My grandfather worked for GE his entire life after coming
| back from Korea in his early 20s, I was 6 in the early 90s
| when he finally retired at age 64/65 and the bosses came to
| his retirement dinner and gave him a gold watch. Can you
| imagine something like that happening today?
| ghaff wrote:
| I've been at a couple companies 10+ years (and a third
| almost that long) and have colleagues who are 20+ years
| but, yeah, it's rare today--certainly in the tech industry,
| probably more common elsewhere.
| [deleted]
| vsskanth wrote:
| The increase in salary would have to be much higher to justify
| paying double the mortgage, not to mention the additional stress
| of actually finding a house in a supply constrained market.
|
| Also, a lot of spouses also work these days, so now you have to
| find two jobs.
|
| Best bet is to find a place with many jobs available for your
| industry and settle down, so you don't have to move for your job.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are plenty of midwest cities where you can cut your
| mortgage. Granted prices are moving up fast there as well, but
| things started a lot lower and since many of those cities allow
| you to build (well they are building suburbs anyway) you can
| get a newish house.
| apercu wrote:
| The issue is inventory. Fewer people are selling, because
| they're locked in to sub-3% mortgages and a new mortgage
| might be 6.5-7%.
|
| As an aside, a friend in real estate thinks the profession
| will lose a lot of agents this year due to lack of
| transactions.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is inventory of new built houses to be had. Some nice
| houses can be had.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I missed the boat around the Raleigh, NC area...i recently
| returned from a trip in the outskirts area of this metro
| looking for a place to land my family...but housing costs are
| just crazy high relative to what they used to be prior to the
| pandemic. I guess other technologists (and i suppose other
| white collar/knowledge workers who can more likely work
| remotely) had the same idea that i had...but well before i
| did. Oh well, on to other areas of the country. :-)
| shagie wrote:
| Some tangential digging:
|
| The survey is from
| https://www.challengergray.com/tags/relocation/ and you can find
| past information there too.
|
| While this is something that appears to be a "hey, look, 2021
| data is even more than the past", it is a trend that has been
| observed in the before times.
|
| Going from the survey/stats company to an article that one of the
| surveys was used in brought me to:
|
| Fewer Americans Uproot Themselves for a New Job :
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/fewer-americans-uproot-themselv...
| which was published on August 20th, 2018.
| mindvirus wrote:
| Not a particularly insightful article, but I suspect mortgages
| have a big part. If you're locked into a 2.5% mortgage trading
| that for 7% is a tough sell, given property values feel pretty
| flat.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Which is an odd state of affairs. Banks don't want that 2.5%
| mortgage on their books, so they should be offering incentives
| to get people off that mortgage. For example, offering a 4%
| rate to anybody holding a 2.5% mortgage would be a huge win-win
| for both sides.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| You mean offering a 4% rate on a new home right? Otherwise
| it's only a win for the bank!
|
| It's complicated with mortgages because, in the US, mortgages
| are mostly securitized and resold. This covers 65% of
| mortgages in 2022 according to
|
| https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff.
| ..
|
| So your mortgage isn't directly on your bank's book. The bank
| sold it, and then likely bought it back but as part of an
| MBS.
|
| In the US, there are a lot of small banks that rely on this
| to reduce their exposure to property prices in the local area
| they originate mortgages in.
| tclancy wrote:
| Things don't work that way plus you're talking about having a
| loan for X at 2.5% and trying to offset it with a rate below
| the current market rate on what is likely a larger number
| than X and more years. Often substantially higher for both.
| refurb wrote:
| Banks don't hold mortgages on their books.
| mindvirus wrote:
| More straightforward in my mind would be letting people buy
| their mortgages. In a world of 7% mortgages, a 2.5% mortgage
| would only trade at ~68% of its value assuming they're both
| 10 years.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| You may want
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_industry_of_Denmark
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I don't know why I never thought until this moment about
| buying my mortgage. That seems super advantageous over just
| paying it off (or buying some other debt at par, since
| there is zero credit risk on a loan to myself).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > For example, offering a 4% rate to anybody holding a 2.5%
| mortgage would be a huge win-win for both sides.
|
| Why would they do that when the US government is paying 4%+,
| and is much more creditworthy than an individual?
|
| That is why a 30 year fixed home mortgage is ~6%+.
| Individuals have to pay a premium since they do not have the
| power to print USD, and so more default risk has to be priced
| in. Plus the labor expenses of underwriting and issuing a new
| loan.
| idontpost wrote:
| [dead]
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Yes, that is exactly why the mortgagee would want to get
| rid of the 2.5% mortgage. It's worth maybe half of its par
| value.
|
| So if the mortgager wants to get rid of the mortgage so
| they can move, and the mortgagee wants to get rid of the
| mortgage because it's worth only half of its par value,
| there should be a massive incentive for a fair deal to
| happen.
|
| Instead, the only option is for the mortgager to pay off
| the par value, which is a huge windfall for the mortgagee
| and a rip-off for the mortgager. So the mortgager decides
| not to move and everybody loses.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > So if the mortgager wants to get rid of the mortgage so
| they can move,
|
| The borrower wants to sell the house, so their main
| concern for the sale of their house is to earn enough
| from the sale to pay off the mortgage and be able to buy
| another house. In which case a higher new mortgage
| interest rate for the new house could be offset by lower
| house prices, but supply and demand have not recalibrated
| to that (yet).
|
| But of course, selling a house is not between the
| mortgage borrower and mortgage lender, it is between the
| homeowner and the potential new mortgage borrower, so
| there is an additional party involved whose needs need to
| be met.
|
| > and the mortgagee wants to get rid of the mortgage
| because it's worth only half of its par value, there
| should be a massive incentive for a fair deal to happen.
|
| The lender can sell the mortgage debt anytime it does not
| want it (and probably has anyway).
|
| The lender is currently deciding to lend to the
| government, at 4%, or an individual homeowner (or
| whatever others borrower). Of course, if the least risky
| entity is giving you 4%, then everyone else needs to give
| you more than 4%.
|
| Interest rates from previously issued mortgages are not
| relevant in making the decision for which interest rate
| to lend at now.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The lender isn't the mortgagee. The mortgagee is whoever
| the lender sold the mortgage on to.
|
| If the mortgagee is the government, then it has even more
| incentive because this broken system is killing
| productivity.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The government wants to limit the increase in prices,
| including house prices, and this is part of the process.
| Whether or not it is worth the side effects, is of
| course, always up for debate.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| On the contrary, increasing mortgage mobility should
| lower prices.
|
| In most cases the mortgager is selling their old house
| and buying another, keeping the same supply/demand
| balance. But in some cases the mortgager is selling one
| house and building a new one, increasing supply and
| lowering prices.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| In theory, but due to various issues such as labor costs,
| zoning laws, permitting costs, and agglomeration of
| economic opportunities, that may not be happening at a
| sufficient rate in a sufficient number of locales.
|
| The Feds do not have much control over those parameters
| though, so they play with what they (politically) can.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Banks hold almost no individual mortgage debt on their books.
| They are almost all packaged into agency securities backed by
| Fannie and Freddy
| bluGill wrote:
| Banks don't care though, as they are not holding the
| mortgage, they are just servicing it. The mortgage itself is
| held by Freddy-Mac/Fanny-Mae, and sold on to bond holders.
| The bank is just charging a fee to service the loan, but the
| loan itself is on someone else's books.
|
| The above isn't 100% true, some banks do hold onto their own
| mortgages. However it is sill reasonable accurate.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| That should make it even easier. If it has been
| securitized, the value of that security is way below par
| value. For example, your $500,000 mortgage at 2.5% might
| only be worth $300,000 on the open market. Somebody could
| buy that mortgage backed bond for $300,000 and offer you a
| $500,000 mortgage at 4% in exchange, resell that mortgage
| for $400,000 and pocket the $100,000 difference.
|
| If I understand correctly, this is how the Danish mortgage
| system works.
| lesuorac wrote:
| IIUC, the somebody spends 300k (for the 2.5% mortgage)
| and then an additional 500k (to you at 4%) to ultimately
| sell a mortgage for 400k which is a net 400k loss but
| they also now own the original house.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| They spend 300k for the original mortgage, and advance
| you another 500k at 4% for the new mortgage. At this
| point you owe them $1M. You then pay them 500k from the
| proceeds of selling the original house. They sell the new
| mortgage on for 400k, netting $100k. You also are ~$100K
| better off than if you had to pay $500K to get rid of the
| original mortgage and then had to borrow $500K at 7% for
| your new house.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Why would you want to take this agreement? It's
| equivalent to borrowing more against your house which
| isn't inherently good. And we already have HELOC for
| people that want it
| toast0 wrote:
| The proposed offer is to get a 4% loan on a different
| house in exchange for paying off the 2.5% loan on the
| existing home.
|
| It's good for the bank for obvious reasons, and it's good
| for the borrower (potentially) because it reduces the
| cost of moving.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Yes, well, the hiccup in your plan is someone voluntarily
| going from a 2.5% mortgage to a 4% mortgage.
|
| The incentive you would have to offer would erase most of
| that $100,000 difference you pulled out of a hat.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The incentive is the ability to move to a city with jobs
| without having to take on a 7% mortgage.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm not sure it's quite that simple.
|
| I got a mortgage at 3% some years ago for an apartment.
| Since then we've had two kids and paid off a chunk of the
| mortgage with our monthly payments. At this stage in my
| life I'd absolutely be looking to convert that into
| buying a larger home and would be happy to pay a higher
| rate for it to happen. But not literally double, which is
| where rates are today.
| paul_f wrote:
| Good idea, but mortgages are bundled together. You cannot
| split one off.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The owner of the bundle can.
| wanttocomment wrote:
| [flagged]
| greenie_beans wrote:
| [flagged]
| wanttocomment wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| mizzao wrote:
| They already resold that 2.5% mortgage; some other party
| bears the risk now.
| mdtancsa wrote:
| The graph was trending down (if the #s are to be actually
| reliable) since the late 2000s, which was a consistent period
| of cheap money / low interest rates. If the recent higher
| interest rates were the driving factor, you would think the
| trend line would have been more stable leading up to Covid and
| then higher rates.
| jleyank wrote:
| Paywalled, but in my experience (me and people I know) it's hard
| to move unless you're single. And even then, moving is a hassle
| in terms of household goods, possible residence sales/purchases
| and the risk of having to do it again in 2-3 years. It was
| trivial when leaving uni, but afterwards things grew stickier.
|
| And once there's more than one person involved, it's quite
| sticky. The partner might have a career/position that's at risk
| if moving. Kids might be old enough or settled enough to have
| relationships outside the family (particularly in HS). There
| might be extended family situations that make moving less
| desirable, or the new geographic location might not be
| interesting or even in the same country.
|
| In lean times, yeah, people moved for work because, work. Now,
| they're able to find satisfactory alternatives that don't involve
| moving - companies would have to pony up enough compensation
| (whatever form) to overcome this inertia/distaste.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| The irony? It's the two-income household that drove up housing
| prices, and as you noted, taken fluidity out of labour market.
| And now we collectively struggle because of both.
| jleyank wrote:
| Wow. I'm in my 60's and have problems with this statement.
| How old are you? If you want to live like the 50's, better
| get ready for 1 car, 4 kids and 1200 sq feet houses (or less)
| in suburbia. And you better get rid of those robots and get
| companies to return salaries to 50's levels. Oh, pensions,
| gotta get them to do pensions again.
|
| Toss the computers also, as we need to reestablish clerical
| positions to give the at-home spouse something to do once the
| last child's in school.
| wanttocomment wrote:
| And they afforded that working a job at a furniture store
| with no degree at age 24.
| fundad wrote:
| Only because discrimination was legal.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Our house currently has 1 car, 0 kids, and a 1600 sq foot
| house, and has been that way for the past 5 years (we
| rented a condo for two years before that). This sounds like
| mostly a step up for me, especially the kids.
|
| We haven't been able to justify having any kids yet still,
| and I'm nearly at the age where it starts becoming harder
| to have them (happens for guys in their mid 40s).
|
| My parents had me and a house in their 20s. I just had
| shitty credit, student loans, and roommates.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Me and my partner work and we've got no cars, no kids, and
| rent a 500sqft flat. I'll very very happily take a 1200sqft
| in suburbia please.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Look the the 1960's to today, as more women entered the
| workplace, labors share of the fruits of their labor was
| halved as productivity doubled.
|
| To go into more detail check out Elizabeth Warren's book:
| The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going
| Broke
|
| From the summary:
|
| In this revolutionary expose, Harvard Law School bankruptcy
| expert Elizabeth Warren and financial consultant Amelia
| Tyagi show that today's middle-class parents are
| increasingly trapped by financial meltdowns. Astonishingly,
| sending mothers to work has made families more vulnerable
| to financial disaster than ever before. Today's two-income
| family earns 75% more money than its single-income
| counterpart of a generation ago, but has 25% less
| discretionary income to cover living costs...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-
| Parents-...
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| And...if we zoom out a bit...the gap in income inequality
| has increased. That is, the result of those two-incomes
| and less discretionary income is more wealth concentrated
| in fewer hands at the top.
| willcipriano wrote:
| It's really interesting. You know how some economists
| said that in the future we would have shorter and shorter
| work weeks due to increases in productivity? Well we did
| and gave most of that benefit to women, then a "totally
| organic" movement decided that women need to be put to
| work and the shorter weeks disappeared leaving families
| worse off than before.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| That's not what I said. Please don't put words in my mouth.
|
| Regardless, it's Economics 101. Supply and demand. And that
| products can and do price based on what the market will
| bear.
|
| It's naive to believe we went from mainly single income
| households to dual (or more) and there were no side
| effects, no unintended consequences.
| nayuki wrote:
| Housing prices rose not because of two-income households
| but because of housing shortages. Because homes for sale
| are in short supply, the homeowner can pick and choose
| the highest bidder.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Yes, supply has been limited. But demand - as well as
| what the market will bear* - has also increased. Price is
| a function of all three.
|
| * We had the 30 yr mortgage and now 40 yr and 50 yr
| mortgages are seen as a way to make buying a home more
| affordable. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. The
| longer term lowers the monthly payment (temporarily) but
| at the same time demand is increased. When demand is
| increased...wait for it...prices increases.
|
| On the other hand, as unpopular as this might be to say,
| limiting mortgages to 25 yrs, 20 yrs, or less would lower
| demand. Yes, please, also increase supply.
|
| If you want a comparable example, look at student loans.
| More loans, larger loans and lower rates...increased
| demand, as well as what the market could bear
| and...prices went up, up, up.
|
| This isn't rocket science. It's Economics 101.
| Unfortunately, most of our political "leader" are versed
| in law, not basic economics.
| seadan83 wrote:
| This ^ Though, I think we need to find data to support
| the claims in this thread. More income and more demand in
| housing could increase prices,but also increase the
| viability of building houses and just as plausibly lead
| to an increase in home construction.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Keep in mind, the divorce rate as also increased. That
| has:
|
| Increased housing demand
|
| Limited the collective buying power of both households
| [deleted]
| lucaspm98 wrote:
| It may be a societal net good to have both parents in the
| workforce, but that doesn't make it wrong to acknowledge
| the downsides.
| matt_s wrote:
| I relocated for a new job, pre-pandemic, and I can attest it
| was hard with a family. Moving before kids get to high school
| is less of an ordeal though. Generally speaking kids tend to
| have proximity friends thru elementary/middle school (grades
| K-8) but then have more common interest based friends going
| into high school. Everyone is different and some will have
| childhood friends from elementary for life. However, I've seen
| many instances when kids are funneled into larger populations
| (elementary to middle, middle to high) their circle of friends
| changes.
|
| The other element of relocating is its much nicer to be in an
| area growing than an area that is declining, economically
| speaking. If there are large pushes for "return to office" or a
| layoff, its much better to have many options in your area vs. a
| few major employers with zero growth.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Man am I in the minority for not wanting to move cause I love the
| place I live?
|
| Everybody's talking about money, as if they're $100k away from
| uprooting and setting up shop somewhere else, but like - why?
| What's so bad about the place you're at?
|
| All my friends are here. All my favorite things are here. It's
| beautiful here. My family is here. Why would I want to live
| somewhere else?
|
| I bought a house here, yes it was a good investment, yes I'm
| holding onto my low interest rate for dear life, but - the reason
| I bought a house here in the first place is because I didn't want
| to be anywhere else. If I wanted to live in Seattle or LA or NYC
| then I'd have moved there a long time ago - I'm certainly not
| going to do it now, for work, of all things.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > Everybody's talking about money
|
| I agree with you, but people are talking about money because in
| this context it's likely money that would be (hypothetically)
| motivating the move in the first place.
| uoaei wrote:
| Ruthless lifestyle minmax-ers are probably over-represented on
| this site, it comes with the intensely analytical and neurotic
| dispositions that are so common among those who are successful
| using their technical expertise.
|
| I share your view: I have a group of close friends and a wider
| network of fun people that I cherish. It's probably the only
| thing keeping me from exercising my dual citizenship and moving
| to Europe to have a chance at a decent life away from such
| obscene rat-race-driven market dynamics.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I think it's important to realize that (at least in the US)
| houses are considered not only an investment - but basically
| one of the keys to retirement. Getting into a house, waiting
| for the market to gradually go up over your lifetime and then
| selling it to retire on that profit is how a _lot_ of people
| get by.
|
| It's not a good system, but it's how it's worked for awhile
| now.
|
| So price and growth is everything, because people don't want to
| be working when they're 80 yrs+.
|
| It's not like the past where great retirement benefits were
| commonplace.
| wnolens wrote:
| Not sure why you got downvoted. This is (was?) almost the
| only working playbook in Canada to secure retirement.
| klodolph wrote:
| And now housing prices for large portions of the Canadian
| population (e.g. GTA) are so high that the prices only make
| sense if you're going in it for price speculation. If you
| treat your Canadian house as an investment, the only way
| that you could possibly come out ahead is if you sell it
| later for an even higher price.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Considering interest rates, if you own a home who can blame you?
| Right now, I owe about $265k on my current home. If I move, and
| even into a home where I only owe the same amount, I'm looking at
| a mortgage payment of roughly twice the price. With the ability
| to work from home for the type of work I do, I'd be crazy to move
| right now.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Well, as others have mentioned, jobs are risky. You can lose them
| for any reason at any time, and leaving your support network is a
| bad idea in that case. This has always been true. It wouldn't
| account for why people are now less likely to wish to move, but I
| think housing prices do.
|
| Right now, a person may have an affordable mortgage at a very low
| fixed interest rate. Yes, he/she may have more than $150k in
| equity due to the insanity of the housing market, but that
| likewise means that all of the other houses have gone up by as
| much if not more in price. This makes moving very unappealing,
| and more so if the place to which one is being asked to move is
| San Francisco, New York City, or some other likewise expensive
| location.
| jl6 wrote:
| There's a fundamental disconnect between how hard it is to
| relocate and how easy it is to lose your job.
|
| The cost of moving is huge: uprooting your family, switching the
| kids' school, losing your friends and local interests, re-
| learning a new community, getting grief from your mortgage lender
| or insurer, paying early termination fees on rent and services,
| legal fees and taxes, packing and unpacking your stuff, loading
| up on new risks...
|
| Whereas your job can end at the whim of a boss or the slightest
| gust of economic headwind.
| astrea wrote:
| Oh it's a willful disconnect. Have you ever asked a job if
| they'd be willing to pay relocation expenses? They know how
| expensive/difficult it is.
| jjav wrote:
| > There's a fundamental disconnect between how hard it is to
| relocate and how easy it is to lose your job.
|
| This is it. The risk is completely one-sided and massive. Just
| ~6 months ago a recruiter reached out with a job that to be
| honest was perfect for my career path goals. But not remote,
| they wanted me to move across the country. Briefly considered
| it but it makes no sense, the risk is way too unreasonable.
|
| If a company wants me to move, give me a contractual guaranteee
| of at least two years salary to be paid even if they reorg my
| position away. Then it's fair game.
| osigurdson wrote:
| This is why remote work is better for the economy.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| It might be better said that remote work is better for the
| remote worker's economy. In regions where remote workers
| moved to, people with money in the bank found themselves
| homeless as there was nowhere left to live.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| And domestic migration is a zero sum game, so local
| policies built on in-migration of skilled workers from
| poorer areas isn't clearly a national good.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| OP's quote: "your job can end at the whim of a boss or the
| slightest gust of economic headwind."
|
| If remote work is established properly, then your remote job
| will end instantly and will be shipped to Canada or Latin
| America (if bosses care about timezones) or to Eastern Europe
| or India (if timezones are not an issue). My company had
| multiple layoffs and then new waves of headcount. Most of the
| layoffs happened in the US. 100% of the new headcount is in
| cheaper countries.
|
| Remote work seems glorious if you look at 2020-21. But beware
| the second order effects!
| saltcured wrote:
| Periodically, I see this argument and I wonder if my work
| experience is really so unusual for tech/knowledge work. I
| do not consider my physical location as my value in
| negotiating or marketing myself. I've worked with people
| from many countries and never considered their current
| location to be that significant either. I managed to take
| work with me when moving overseas for several years. I
| eventually returned and work with several of the same folks
| still.
|
| Working in academic R&D, I've usually found myself in
| "virtual" teams spread over many time zones or even
| continents, so the people I work most closely with are not
| the ones I would see in the office building and accompany
| to lunch. We were effectively embodying more of a glorified
| coworking space before any of us had heard of this as a
| named concept.
|
| My boss always professed a preference for onsite
| collaboration but then was, ironically, the one most often
| away on travel or offsite at other satellite locations in
| our city. I could be in the office daily but not see him
| for weeks, going even longer between substantive face to
| face conversations. Most coordination was already digital
| before the pandemic.
|
| At the same time, our division with a dozen or so employees
| is supposedly tight-knit and managed as a matrix org to
| share responsibilities. But in reality, logical silos are
| formed. Only a couple people pay attention to any one
| project and usually do so for an entire, multi-year project
| lifecycle. When we were onsite, we would spend most days in
| our private offices and not have a work-driven reason to
| visit one another.
|
| Our group went from all onsite to hybrid with several
| remote-only. The rest agreed to return to the office one
| day per week on a day they chose by consensus. After a year
| of this, I can see that the locals often struggle to get
| quorum for the scheduled onsite day. We've also struggled
| to get our nominal quarterly all-hands get togethers to
| actually recur.
|
| Fast approaching my 50s, I think more about lifestyle
| effects on my future health, or about retirement savings
| and the economy as a whole. I don't see that outsourcing of
| our individual "remote" jobs is a risk worth pondering.
| Rather, it would be whole companies or sectors as part of
| bigger trade wars or economic crashes. That is another kind
| of conceit to worry that our knowledge work could be out-
| competed by foreign workers while the parent organization
| and managerial layers are not also subject to competition
| from foreign companies.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > If remote work is established properly, then your remote
| job will end instantly and will be shipped to Canada or
| Latin America (if bosses care about timezones) or to
| Eastern Europe or India
|
| That was already happening. Remote work doesnt change
| anything with that.
|
| Moreover, dont think that the senior dev in those other
| places will work for American companies for dimes like
| that. They will want the equivalent of top dollar in their
| country and that ends up being closer to the cost of the
| remote American dev when the obscene real estate/housing
| costs and general cost of living in places like SF or NY
| are removed from the equation. If you dont give that remote
| overseas dev the competitive rate in his/her country, he
| will either go with someone who does or he will just follow
| the traditional, more respectable career track in his
| country - like moving to manager positions in a respectable
| local corporation or launching his own business.
|
| And if the American company goes for junior devs who are
| actually willing to be working for dimes when they start,
| they will get sloppy jobs like how they get with such cheap
| outsourcing now. And at the moment those juniors gain some
| experience, they will either ask for competitive pay or
| they will leave and take the traditional career route.
| mech422 wrote:
| I've been thru 2(3?) offshoring crazes already in tech...
| and yet, the tech market now is bigger/better paying then
| ever.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Equalising world GDP will be good in the long run at least.
| Of course it sucks if it happens to be you on the chopping
| block
| ejb999 wrote:
| It won't be good for 50% of the people/countries that are
| already above average - it will only be good for the 50%
| below average.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Only if the level of happiness is constant, which it
| isn't.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| And more justice for all.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > good in the long run
|
| And extremely disastrous in the short run. If societies
| lose good paying jobs, that is asking for a populist
| uprising which typically goes pretty bad pretty soon.
| jeffwask wrote:
| > If remote work is established properly, then your remote
| job will end instantly and will be shipped to Canada or
| Latin America (if bosses care about timezones) or to
| Eastern Europe or India (if timezones are not an issue).
|
| This was always the case for companies that wanted to
| offshore. Remote work hasn't changed that.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| I addressed this in another comment so copying it here:
|
| [remote work] hasn't really been a reality the way it is
| today. During covid, we were forced to implement norms
| and tools for remote working (like Zoom). Also, we
| learned about replacing an expensive worker for a cheaper
| one one at a time. Earlier, there used to be entire teams
| in some remote location, so it was similar to having 2
| islands (one large, one small) with a bridge which was
| crossed may be once or twice a year during annual trips
| to HQ. Now with one-new-person-at-a-time, teams don't
| lose productivity but over time, American workers are
| replaced with cheaper ones.
|
| Source: seeing it myself in my current company. Also
| remembers: shareholder class is ruthless. If I can see
| this, they are seeing and acting on it as well.
|
| Edit: cannot reply to the unity1001's reply so editing
| here - sorry to break it to you but earlier, there were
| only tools. Covid forced us to implement cultural norms
| and processes to actually work with those tools
| effectively. That was missing before.
| juve1996 wrote:
| "Cultural norms" has never, ever gotten in the way of
| profit.
|
| Companies have been working with offshore talent for
| decades.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > [remote work] hasn't really been a reality the way it
| is today. During covid, we were forced to implement norms
| and tools for remote working (like Zoom).
|
| Sorry to break it to you, but those tools were around and
| the companies that were outsourcing were already using
| them heavily way before. So that's not a factor for
| anything being different either.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Offshoring to the lowest bidder and hiring remote from
| all over the world are completely different things and
| not remotely comparable.
| unity1001 wrote:
| What? You seem to think that offshoring/outsourcing =>
| only hiring an external company to do the work. It isnt.
| Companies have been setting up local subsidiaries in
| offshoring countries to hire local talent there and
| offshore the work to their own subsidiaries. It didnt
| bring down salaries. Neither did contracting out dev work
| to external companies overseas.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| This is an argument for protectionist employment laws
| from the government. If you work for one of these Fortune
| 100 companies with activist investors who are now pushing
| to have every new hire come from India -- regardless of
| official WFH policy -- you're already fucked anyway.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Have you not looked at the past two decades in tech?
| Offshoring and hiring firms in other countries has been
| attempted for a long, long time. The reason why it fails is
| because offshoring even in a fully remote environment is
| _hard_ , from cultural differences, work quality, time zone
| differentials and so forth. You can hire a company in India
| to do work, but optimizing for cost and hiring a cheap shop
| instead of one of the more premium ones means you get
| exactly what you paid for.
|
| Every time companies either bring the jobs back, bring the
| people back or spend more on hiring good firms in their
| offshore country of choice.
| brewdad wrote:
| So what happens when instead of shipping entire
| departments to India, companies hire a specific
| individual in Dublin or Topeka Kansas for half of what a
| SV employee costs? There won't be nearly the issues of
| culture or time zones or whatever. For now, remote
| salaries are holding up to what workers made in their
| HCOL offices. That won't and can't hold true over the
| long run.
| mozman wrote:
| Big cities don't work for everyone, it's exhausting. As an
| older man I have different requirements.
| gregors wrote:
| You move to a big city when you are young. Enjoy the social
| activities, the night life etc. If at some point you get
| married, have kids etc - generally you don't get to make full
| use of the city anymore, though you're still paying full
| price.
|
| What I see A LOT is when people have kids, if they originally
| came from somewhere else is that the city's shine really
| dulls. They move back to where they came from, especially if
| there's a family support structure there. At one place I
| worked we snatched several senior engineers leaving LA and SF
| for a more family oriented life.
|
| They move back home, new young people take their place and
| cycle continues.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| A city is, of course, more than the kinds of things that
| are taken to appeal to single young people today (though
| studies show that the young are increasingly becoming
| socially isolated).
|
| Cities are more compact than suburbs. Kids are entirely
| dependent on their parents and adults to drive them
| everywhere, so in many poorly planned suburbs and bedroom
| communities, they're generally stuck at home. Similarly,
| the elderly can become isolated from family and friends
| that are scattered about with no easy way to visit them, or
| kept from participating in the social life of their town
| because either there is no social life due to hostile urban
| planning, or because they cannot get there as driving has
| become more difficult with age. The benefit of living in
| walkable cities and towns with good public transportation
| is especially obvious for these age groups.
| ghaff wrote:
| People do often stay in greater metros. They just move out
| of the core city. (Of course, there's no guarantee that
| young people move into the core en masse either. They often
| weren't in the 70s/80s. A city like Boston was losing
| population until almost 2000.)
| bombcar wrote:
| Based on: https://www.mark-pearson.com/airport-distances/
|
| > Half the people in the United States live within 17
| miles of a decent-sized airport, and ninety percent of
| the country lives within 58 miles (about an hours drive).
| Twenty-five percent of the population lives pretty darn
| close: less than 9 miles.
|
| it would seem that the vast majority of the USA lives "in
| or near a greater metro".
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> it would seem that the vast majority of the USA lives
| "in or near a greater metro"
|
| To the extent that you consider the cities of Monroe
| (Louisiana), Ketchikan (Alaska), Elmira (New York), and
| La Crosse (Wisconsin) to be the centers of "greater
| metro" areas.
|
| They're not greater metro areas in the same sense that
| NYC, LA, SF, or Boston are greater metro areas.
| bombcar wrote:
| True, but I'd certainly consider those "cities" and not
| "rural" but you can draw the line elsewhere; whatever or
| wherever you draw the line a substantial group of people
| live "in a metro area".
| ghaff wrote:
| The US Census defines 80% of the US population as being
| urban. As you say, you can draw the line anywhere and I
| assume the US Census is defining it as being something
| along the lines of being somewhat accessible to a city of
| not completely trivial size. Which is fine as long as
| people don't read that as 80% of the population living
| somewhere that looks anything like a sizable city.
| danaris wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think that's a good metric for "greater
| metro". Some of the "major" airports they listed were the
| closest for a grand total of about 3000 people.
|
| I live in a small rural college town in upstate NY that
| has its own municipal airport; there are more than 3000
| people here (especially during the school year!) for whom
| this is the closest airport, and it's...well, it's tiny,
| with (AFAIK) zero regular flights to or from anywhere
| else.
|
| The closest cities are Utica and Syracuse, each about 30
| miles away. Only Syracuse has an airport that's worth
| driving to if you don't own your own plane (SYR is on the
| list as being closest for 1.2 million people--probably
| including me? The maps aren't loading, so I can't tell),
| and I've never heard anyone describe Syracuse, NY as
| being a "greater metro area".
| bombcar wrote:
| I'd like to see someone do something similar with
| _international_ airport, some of those are pretty small
| but the vast majority are "big".
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| I'm not sure if there is a proper definition for an
| _international_ airport, but I 'd think of it as an
| airport with US Customs and/or Immigration services.
|
| I think you'd be surprised how many there are, especially
| within a few hundred miles of the Canadian or Mexican
| border! My local general aviation airport, with no
| commercial passenger flights, is an international airport
| because of nearby business/industrial activity.
| ghaff wrote:
| You could also just draw a line further up the list. 100K
| passengers/year is under 300/day so you may be looking at
| a handful of regional jet flights that are mostly (or
| only) to the nearest significant airport.
|
| Just eyeballing the list, what I'd consider a
| "significant" airport probably has a cutoff closer to a
| million passengers per year.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| He's including a lot of airports that are not what most
| people think of as "a greater metro" like KFAT or KGCN
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > They move back to where they came from, especially if
| there's a family support structure there.
|
| This is a big deal for workers with families and closer-to-
| median income. Having to pay $20,000-$30,000/yr to replace
| services you're getting for free from family (child care,
| help with home improvement/repair projects, help with
| transportation, all kinds of stuff) might not be that big a
| deal to a family making $300,000, but it's _huge_ to a
| family making $70,000. A 20% increase in income made
| possible by moving away from family might make good sense
| for the former, but be break-even at best for the latter
| (and a losing proposition of CoL is otherwise higher than
| where they are).
| goodpoint wrote:
| > Enjoy the social activities, the night life etc. If at
| some point you get married, have kids
|
| ...and then people wonder why birth rate is declining.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Living downtown in a big city, perhaps not. You can still be
| close enough to a big city to participate in its labor market
| while living in a much less dense area.
| whateveracct wrote:
| It's the number 1 reason I will always be remote (and was well
| before the pandemic).
|
| Number 2 is that I get my work & meetings done in the morning
| and can call it quits at lunch every day (and often do nothing
| Fridays).
| 13of40 wrote:
| > your job can end at the whim of a boss
|
| Maybe it's a big company thing, but every time I've had to end
| someone's job it took several months of performance management
| and about 50 to 100 pages of documentation. Imagine about a
| year of having your team limping and not being able to achieve
| its commitments, while you have to be polite and supportive to
| a hostile person who's obviously on their way out but can't see
| it, and all the while your 1:1 meetings with your boss start
| with "Sooooo... What's going on with Charlie? Are you
| documenting? I don't feel like you're documenting." Every
| meeting you walk into where they ask why "X" isn't done yet,
| you can't tell them that Charlie fundamentally can't deliver
| it, because any mention of that is wandering into HR territory,
| and you can't take Charlie off of "X" because that's going to
| screw up the continuity of your documentation. Meanwhile,
| Charlie is wandering around the halls trying to foment some
| kind of misguided rebellion against you, and (edit: possibly)
| stealing stuff.
|
| So not really a whim.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Thats if you want to get rid of an individual. It's easy if
| you can just put the problem person on the layoff list
| because the company is doing a 10% WFR as part of a stock
| market right-sizing initiative
| mortenjorck wrote:
| One termination is a special case; a 20% layoff is just the
| regular course of business.
|
| (with apologies to Stalin)
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| That's because you've worked at companies that want to
| protect this part of their reputation or liability.
|
| Most companies aren't massive and don't have these types of
| reputational or liability concerns.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Even here in the UK, if a company is having redundancies you
| can be out the door in days or even hours. Firing a specific
| person for something non-performance needs paperwork, but
| that's a very specific case.
| maccard wrote:
| > Firing a specific person for something <snip> needs
| paperwork
|
| Assuming they've been employed for longer than 2 years. If
| they've been there less than 2 years, it's pretty much in
| line with the US.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Depends massively on the company. Some are like that, in
| others it can be at the drop of a hat with no performance
| reasons needed at all.
| yardie wrote:
| They could fire Charlie without cause. Sounds like management
| just doesn't want to pay out UI or severance. So they'll let
| you suffer to document a cause.
|
| So Charlie is such a big problem they need to get rid of
| them, but not enough of a problem where the solution is
| money.
| 13of40 wrote:
| No, it's all about the company being averse to getting
| sued. Even though I'm in a state that allows that in
| theory, it's not uncommon for people to sue for a six
| figure sum and get a settlement if you don't do everything
| perfectly.
| yardie wrote:
| Yeah, that's what severance is for. Sign this paper that
| holds us harmless. We give you money to never see you
| again.
|
| This is a problem that could be solved with money. If
| Charlie is as bad as described the boss would pay for
| them to go away instead of dragging it out through a
| drawn-out documentation process.
| brewdad wrote:
| So, the problem is money just like the previous poster
| said. You can pay the poor employee for a few months
| while building documentation to CYA or you can fire them
| immediately and potentially owe them the 3 months (and
| likely more) from a settlement. Taking months to fire an
| underperformer is simply an exercise in risk management
| not a legal necessity.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| One word: "Layoffs"
|
| And the "performance management" thing it's only at certain
| positions and certain industries. For most people, that is
| not a thing ( which can be a plus too ).
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >and probably stealing stuff
|
| This is needless and makes me value the rest of the insight
| less.
| 13of40 wrote:
| Depending on the person, it can be true. I know through
| mutual friends that the first person I ever had to
| terminate walked off with a hard drive full of our IP and a
| prototype dev kit of a device the company was working on.
| JohnFen wrote:
| There's a huge difference between "it can be true" and
| "probably stealing stuff".
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Jurisdiction matters a lot. Where?
|
| If we are talking about a place with very few labour
| protection laws (HK/SG/US), forget it: You can layoff after a
| 10 min discussion. No biggie. Maybe throw a few months of
| severance pay. If we are talking about Japan, France, or
| Germany, it is a negotiation with the labour union. (Denmark
| is a very interesting exception due to "Flex-Security".)
|
| I cannot help but bring up the infamous "Amazon PIP"
| (performance improvement plan): What is the point? Just sack
| me with a package on Day One. Much easier and less
| emotionally damaging!
| sib wrote:
| The GP was not talking about a layoff but a termination "at
| the whim of a boss." I've also worked at a number of big
| companies in the US, in "at-will" states, and the process
| is much like the GP describes.
| dangerwill wrote:
| I like how you say this from the perspective not of a team
| lead but as another person on the team. Which means you
| actually don't have any real sense of how much documentation
| your boss had to do, just what your boss told you they did.
|
| "Sooooo... What's going on with Charlie? Are you documenting?
| I don't feel like you're documenting." sounds like you
| hounded your boss into firing your teammate instead of
| continuing to coach them.
| 13of40 wrote:
| The part in quotes is the lead's manager talking. By the
| time you're being performance managed, your boss, their
| boss, their boss, etc. know about it, and the higher you go
| in the chain the more you're just a line in a spreadsheet
| that needs to be eliminated. You're on a 100 person team
| that needs to figure out how to get to 97, and you're the
| low hanging fruit because you're already marked. What you
| (as an IC) assume is your boss being a dick is actually a
| vast mechanism behind your boss, including upper management
| and HR, pushing them to resolve the situation.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > By the time you're being performance managed, your
| boss, their boss, their boss, etc. know about it, and the
| higher you go in the chain the more you're just a line in
| a spreadsheet
|
| This is so true.
|
| I've never been "performance managed", but if I were to
| be, I'd immediately start looking for another job because
| of what you're describing. Even if I wasn't eventually
| fired, I know that black mark will color everyone's
| perception of me from then on.
| stefap2 wrote:
| So I guess, if you are in a situation when you can easily
| relocate one could use to their advantage and ask for more
| money.
|
| But with remote work relocation will be less of a necessity.
|
| Usually all the fees are covered by the relocation benefits.
| spacemadness wrote:
| One of the most frustrating things I've seen during any period
| of layoffs including this one is seeing people that have just
| moved for a new position get laid off soon after. Especially so
| if they've moved overseas. Like you said, culturally we've
| decided that the newly laid off and relocated took the risk and
| it's their fault for taking that risk. Companies apparently
| share no part in the burden even while trying to lure folks to
| work for them.
| acchow wrote:
| You can see which jobs are sharing in the burden of the move:
| those offering significant signing bonuses on top of
| relocation costs
| vipa123 wrote:
| Gains are for the company and shareholders, losses are for
| the employees and society.
| krapp wrote:
| And Americans will do nothing about it, even as they suffer
| under it, because they see themselves not as an oppressed
| proletariat, but temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| I had a boss who moved a guy from Russia to the US just so he
| could fire him. He was gone ten days after he arrived and all
| the paperwork was done. I guess that worker protections in
| Russia were really strong at the time, the guy was
| untouchable while he was there.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| That's a crime in California. Labor Code section 1050[1]
|
| [1]:https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayS
| ectio....
| busterarm wrote:
| I hope you got a different boss soon after.
| willdough wrote:
| [dead]
| junon wrote:
| Yeah exactly. Stop being a bystander to shitty company
| practices. A lot of them have forgotten that their
| employees make them profitable and scalable.
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| American workers are the wimpiest creatures on the
| planet. That's why they don't have unions, tolerate
| horrible bosses, and have few protections.
| badrabbit wrote:
| It's not wimpiness, it's an essential acceptance of
| cruelty that is accepted as a neccessary part of the
| american psyche where not just individuals but businesses
| have that freedom.
|
| "If I was the company owner or the boss, I might do that
| to in order to protect my money"
| Clent wrote:
| You're describing a mental illness and yet I still agree
| with you.
| ars wrote:
| And the strongest most productive economy on Earth. Which
| the employees benefit from.
| mempko wrote:
| Which SOME employees benefit from. The poverty rate is
| too high, too many people in jail for such a rich
| country. What's the point of being rich when only a tiny
| percentage of the people benefit?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Well, a lot of the people you're addressing here are the
| ones benefiting, so I don't know what sort of answer
| you're expecting.
| ars wrote:
| Everyone in the US is benefiting from this.
|
| People in the US are so comfortable they don't seem to
| have a clue what real hardship actually is.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| You can expect people to have empathy and be self-aware.
| It doesn't mean your expectations will be met, but it's a
| sad world we live in where you dismiss this as
| unrealistic.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| The United States has the highest median income in the
| world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
|
| If we look at the income level of the poorest 10%, the
| United States ranks 16th--not as good, but still among
| the 10% best countries:
| https://ourworldindata.org/poverty (click on the Table
| tab)
| lmm wrote:
| > The United States has the highest median income in the
| world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
|
| Only because it's unique among developed countries in
| seeing healthcare costs as disposable income.
| ars wrote:
| The poverty rate is not high. Actual hunger in the US is
| so low that they had to pick a new metric "food
| insecurity" to work on.
|
| Maybe travel a bit and see what actual poverty is.
| GoldenMonkey wrote:
| How about access to electricity, clean water, modern
| medicine.
|
| Even our poor people have cars.
|
| We all benefit and even our pets have a higher quality of
| life than most people in the third world.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| It's not that hard having a productive economy when most
| of your workforce is mainly composed of essentially
| indenture servants.
| ars wrote:
| The only way you could say such a thing would be if you
| were profoundly ignorant on what indentured servitude
| actually is.
|
| Maybe look it up.
| OJFord wrote:
| They don't? All the tech companies I hear about having
| unions are American. (They are also big I suppose, but
| when I worked at Arm in the UK there were frequently
| outsiders sort of 'protesting' for employees to join. I
| was never aware of anyone caring who worked there.)
|
| It seems weird to me to have _professional_ unions,
| doctors are an outlier there, where it 's common, and
| (partly I suppose _because_ ) there isn't a professional
| institution (which overlap slightly) - it's split between
| unions and the GMC (licencing body, and as a doctor you'd
| whistle-blow to them for example).
|
| I'd like to see more software engineers be professionally
| registered, and it be more worthwhile to. (Yes, quite
| chicken-and-egg I'm sure.) I'm a member of the IET, but
| to be honest their light on software-relevance. The
| chartership requirements for example seemed like they
| would require quite a bit of bullshitting (not _lying_
| exactly, just sort of business-speak style forcing
| something to fit the very specific irrelevant questions)
| to satisfy; I abandoned it, so far at least.
| nielsbot wrote:
| A commenter below mentions unions.
|
| This could be the answer.
|
| I think tech workers so far have been paid and treated
| well (at least where I work) and so haven't felt the need
| to unionize. But having a union would certainly protect
| against these kinds of problems. (Being relocated and
| then immediately laid off)
| joshmarlow wrote:
| I actually think this is the core cause of a lot of
| current popular hate of capitalism - shitty managers (I'm
| thinking the /r/antiwork sort of sentiment). People
| conflate shitty managers with how the system
| intrinsically works, which is an over simplification.
|
| Now there _is_ an argument that operating in our
| 'capitalist' system introduces incentives to be a shitty
| manager (I think this is approximately Chomsky's
| perspective).
| concordDance wrote:
| Note that reddit in general, those whose posts rise in
| particular and posts that rise to the top of that
| subreddit even more in particular, is _extremely_
| unrepresentative of actually common sentiment.
|
| To get an a less biased view you can chat to people on
| public transport (in Europe) or talk to your neighbours
| (in the USA).
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > Note that reddit in general, those whose posts rise in
| particular and posts that rise to the top of that
| subreddit even more in particular, is extremely
| unrepresentative of actually common sentiment.
|
| Why?
| giantrobot wrote:
| Reddit has a severe astroturfing problem. Any subreddit
| that gets any attention (or ends up in /r/all) gets
| hammered with socket puppets and astroturf campaigns.
| Groups can very cheaply buy upvotes for pretty much
| anything.
|
| Reddit has shown little appetite for combating this issue
| because their value is the number of eyeball-seconds they
| receive every day. They want to report huge eyeball
| numbers you investors and advertisers.
| concordDance wrote:
| A whole bunch of different effects, present on most forms
| of social media:
|
| Evaporative cooling (if an environment appeals to people
| they'll join and if an environment gets more extreme
| those who least like that direction will leave). The
| presence of visible up votes and downvotes magnifies this
| effect.
|
| Founder effects. Reddit in general and any given sub in
| particular was initially populated with people who are a
| bit unusual in some fashion. E.g. the initial reddit
| population was very techy. This effect also applies to
| any Internet forum (both in that Internet forums are used
| by somewhat odd people like us and that an Internet forum
| on Thing will pull people interested in Thing and
| interest in Thing very likely correlates with many other
| factors, such as socioeconomic status, culture, gender,
| subculture)
|
| General interest in going online to talk about things.
| The vast majority of people do not go online to talk and
| argue with strangers, those who do are different along a
| number of axes (such as a lack of young kids or higher
| disagreeableness) which in turn correlate with other
| traits and beliefs.
|
| In Reddit case there's also an element of active
| moderation, mostly due to founder effects, but also due
| to them being the only ones actually caring a lot (being
| activist) the main subs are policed by a bunch of
| supermoderators (who are mods in hundreds of subs) with
| similar views on issues such as trans rights and as a
| moral duty will actively attempt to remove people who
| express other viewpoints to keep the place tidy (without
| the viewpoints that are offensive and wrong).
| JohnFen wrote:
| Because the population of Reddit users is not
| representative of the population in general. This is true
| for all such places (including HN).
| goodpoint wrote:
| > People conflate shitty managers with how the system
| intrinsically works
|
| When the system intrinsically works by producing shitty
| managers the problem is in the system, by definition.
| joshmarlow wrote:
| > When the system intrinsically works by producing shitty
| managers the problem is in the system, by definition.
|
| Is bad management intrinsic though? Wouldn't that make
| the presence of good management surprising?
|
| It seems to me that people work better when they enjoy
| their job and nobody likes working under a bad manager,
| so bad management is a sign of incompetence and degrades
| operations.
|
| The presence of bad management is an opportunity to
| optimize operations; treating people well is generally
| good for the people and the business.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| The problem that seems to expose to me, is why do we have
| so many (shitty) managers. Are managers just prone to be
| shitty?
|
| Part of me thinks so. I think if you renamed every
| managers title to other titles like "clerk" and
| "facilitator" and basically reset what it means to be a
| manager, it feels like things would be different. At
| least for a while.
|
| But then my theories swing back the other way. I have
| observed that many of my peers _want_ to be "managed."
| What they like about the arrangement is the feeling of
| isolated from responsibility and liability. Do as told.
| It's sort of an "anti self reliance" thing. An attempt to
| be, as an adult, in a relationship that looks more like a
| subservient child-parent relationship.
| thewebcount wrote:
| > I have observed that many of my peers want to be
| "managed." What they like about the arrangement is the
| feeling of isolated from responsibility and liability. Do
| as told. It's sort of an "anti self reliance" thing. An
| attempt to be, as an adult, in a relationship that looks
| more like a subservient child-parent relationship.
|
| What a bizarre take. I like programming, I don't like
| dealing with all the people stuff. I've run my own
| business and it involved focusing on all the things I
| find uninteresting and focusing very little on the things
| I find very interesting. So for me it's just a matter of
| not liking that position. This belief that everyone who
| isn't in management is some sort of troglodyte who can't
| pick their own nose is very childish.
| nradov wrote:
| Management is a skill like any other. Very few people are
| born competent managers but most people can be trained as
| such. The trouble is that most organizations promote
| their top individual contributors to management without
| giving them additional training. You'll see a lot of
| snarky comments on HN about MBA programs but the good
| ones do instill at least some basic level of competence.
|
| Of course training alone is insufficient. The
| organizational culture and incentives also have to be
| aligned. The US military puts a major focus on training
| officers to be effective leaders, and yet the results
| have been mixed. Toxic leadership is one of the main
| problems driving their current retention crisis.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > You'll see a lot of snarky comments on HN about MBA
| programs but the good ones do instill at least some basic
| level of competence.
|
| I strongly disagree with this. MBA programs are part of
| the problem in my opinion. They train people to be good
| "managers" for a company's interests which is often
| actively hostile to the people who report into that
| manager.
|
| The MBA-ification of management and companies is to treat
| people like units of work not humans.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| I agree we shouldn't stand for shitty employers. But,
| especially right now, it can be hard for a dev to find a
| job. Especially if the dev has dependents taking up time
| for take home tests etc. Or if they have a visa the
| employer needs to manage.
|
| I suggest we should have something like an actor's guild
| instead, where a floor of basic protections are necessary
| but there's no ceiling on payment and benefits.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| What's the difference between that and a union?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Nothing, it is a union.
| slg wrote:
| There isn't any. The Screen Actors Guild is a union that
| merged with the American Federation of Television and
| Radio Artists union to make what the grandparent comment
| is likely referring to as the "actor's guild". They are a
| traditional labor union and member of the AFL-CIO. They
| are also seemingly poised to go on strike at the end of
| next month.
|
| Often times when someone criticizes the idea of unions,
| it is because they don't fully understand their purpose,
| flexibility, and flaws. For example, that comment could
| imply that unions somehow cap payments and benefits, but
| that isn't some universal truth of unions (that person
| also could just be using guild as a synonym for union,
| but that isn't necessarily true and it doesn't appear to
| be how they're using it). Unions negotiate on behalf of
| their members. If the union members don't want caps on
| compensation, the union can negotiate for no caps.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Is it realistically possible to be a actor or screen
| writer without joining this union? If not, then isn't the
| union itself a monopoly and a form of tyranny?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| You can work with independent studios but you're not
| going to get distribution.
|
| Tyranny is a pretty hefty word for "can't get a
| particular job without agreeing to the rules of the
| employer"
| Buttons840 wrote:
| What if a group of distributed "mainstream" (not sure the
| right term?) writers are unhappy with the rules of their
| employment, including the rules of their union. Are they
| able to organize and collectively bargain with both their
| employers and their union? In other words, when it comes
| to these large unions that dominate an industry, are sub-
| groups within that union able to organize and
| collectively bargain, forming a sub-union of sorts? My
| understanding is that large unions make it harder for
| people within the union to organize and collectively
| bargain, which is, of course, quite ironic.
| slg wrote:
| Unions are democratic entities. A subgroup in that union
| would need to either directly lobby union leadership or
| convince their peers. This can include running for union
| leadership positions themselves.
|
| It works just like democracy does at larger scales. I
| can't just declare my property its own new state with me
| as governor just because I don't like the political
| opinions of the state's leadership. I can however leave
| that state or leave the country entirely just like a
| person can leave the union. However, there are obvious
| repercussions for that decision.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Exactly. I was criticized for using the word tyranny; a
| union is capable of tyranny to the same extent a
| democratic government is. Everyone can judge for
| themselves to what that extent is.
|
| You say a small group can't just form their own country,
| or in this case, they cannot just form their own union,
| but they actually _could_ if only the mega-union did not
| already exist. Thus, my claim that large unions prevent
| small groups from organizing and collectively bargaining
| is true. The small group _could_ form their own union if
| the large union hadn 't removed their ability to do so. I
| feel about large unions the same way I feel about any
| large group that prevents small groups from organizing.
| slg wrote:
| >You say a small group can't just form their own country,
| or in this case, they cannot just form their own union,
| but they actually could if only the mega-union did not
| already exist. Thus, my claim that large unions prevent
| small groups from organizing and collectively bargaining
| is true. The small group could form their own union if
| the large union hadn't removed their ability to do so.
|
| The small group can form their own union. They just won't
| be a part of the big union anymore. Like I said, they
| need to leave the union/state/country.
|
| I don't understand what argument you are really making
| here. Even within your hypothetical small group, there
| can be an even smaller group. You effectively are arguing
| against any type of collective because there will always
| be some people who disagree.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > The small group can form their own union. They just
| won't be a part of the big union anymore. Like I said,
| they need to leave the union/state/country.
|
| How is this different than, let's say, Amazon telling a
| group, "that's fine if you want to organize, but you'll
| have to find another company to do it at" and then firing
| the group. I believe it is illegal for a company to
| prevent a group from organizing, but apparently it _is_
| legal for a union to prevent a group from organizing.
|
| I'm not sure what the solution is, I'm not that
| knowledgeable about unions beyond recognizing that people
| within a union lose their ability to form a union
| (because they're already in a union). I also recognize
| that once a union is large enough, sub-groups within that
| union might want to organize independently, but they
| cannot. Probably what I would argue for is making
| exclusive contracts with unions illegal.
| slg wrote:
| >How is this different than, let's say, Amazon telling a
| group, "that's fine if you want to organize, but you'll
| have to find another company to do it at" and then firing
| the group. I believe it is illegal for a company to
| prevent a group from organizing, but apparently it is
| legal for a union to prevent a group from organizing.
|
| Amazon is preventing the union from organizing. The
| larger union is not preventing another union from
| organizing, it is just saying you can't create a rival
| union while staying a member of another union. People are
| still free to create a smaller union, they just need to
| leave the big union.
|
| The smaller union can negotiate with Amazon, the
| Hollywood studios, or whoever else. The bigger union is
| also free to negotiate on behalf of its members and get
| Amazon, the Hollywood studios, or whoever to not work
| with the smaller union. That is just a negotiation. The
| group with the more power will get a better deal. That is
| the whole point of a union. A smaller union has less
| power and therefore will inherently be less successful
| than a big union.
|
| Unions often work to solidify power because that results
| in better deals for its members. That will include both
| mergers like the previously mentioned SAG-AFTRA merger
| and this type of behavior to squash rival unions. It all
| depends on what its members think is the best strategy.
|
| >I'm not that knowledgeable about unions beyond
| recognizing that people within a union lose their ability
| to form a union (because they're already in a union).
|
| I just don't understand why this is a flaw. What value do
| you think this second smaller union will bring to its
| members that the bigger union can't? If the smaller union
| wants its own seat at the negotiation table, then it no
| longer acting as part of the bigger union anyway in which
| case there is no restriction on the second union being
| created (unless the big union negotiates for this
| exclusivity which is within their rights).
| ghaff wrote:
| And it may be worth noting that "aspiring actor" is
| probably not considered the epitome of someone on a
| guaranteed safe and lucrative career path. But it does
| guarantee that if they _can_ land a job, they 're going
| to get paid scale (~$1k/day I believe).
| busterarm wrote:
| The film and television unions are a tough nut to crack.
| On the west coast, that's almost all there is and if
| you're working you will be in the union easy. Unless you
| do youtube/streaming content and most of that is non-
| union.
|
| On the east coast, you're going to be working probably
| for 10 years before you can get into your union and it's
| an uphill struggle the whole way.
|
| And union or not, you're only going to get work if people
| like working with you. One day with a bad attitude and
| you can find yourself unable to get hired by anyone. Film
| and TV is long hours and a stressful environment and
| nobody wants to work with anyone who makes the day
| harder.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Is it because people get in the union on the west coast
| and then move east?
|
| Or are you just stuck in the local that you started in
| (and would then _definitely_ be unwilling to relocate
| once you're in?
|
| (Not sure how the regionalization works if the unions are
| national)
| ncallaway wrote:
| The actor's guild is a union.
|
| There are lots of different unions with lots of different
| structures. This person is saying we should have a union
| with a structure similar to that union.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839, is a good
| model for a programmer's union.[1] TAG represents
| animators at Disney, Sony, and some lesser studios.
| (Mostly Disney now, because Disney acquired everybody
| else.)
|
| This is the current Master Agreement.[2] It specifies
| minimum wages, but not maximums. "Nothing in this
| Agreement shall prevent any individual from negotiating
| and obtaining from the Producer better conditions and
| terms of employment than those herein provided."
|
| See section 5, "Hours". "Time worked on the employee's
| sixth workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and
| one-half (11/2) times the hourly rate provided herein for
| such employee's classification. Time worked on the
| employee's seventh workday of the workweek shall be paid
| at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such
| employee's classification. Minimum call for the sixth and
| seventh days shall be four (4) hours. ... All time worked
| in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours (including
| meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be
| Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the
| applicable hourly rate provided herein for such
| employee's classification."
|
| These are standard union terms in Hollywood. This is why
| film scheduling is a discipline but software development
| scheduling is a joke. Hollywood has crunches, and they
| hit the producer's budget hard. So planning goes into
| avoiding crunches.
|
| Despite significant efforts, TAG has been unable to
| unionize game developers.
|
| [1] https://animationguild.org/
|
| [2] https://animationguild.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/12/2018-2...
| jylam wrote:
| "But, especially right now, it can be hard for a dev to
| find a job. "
|
| What ?
| sveme wrote:
| A couple of friends and myself got laid off in Germany a
| short while ago - was really tough finding a new job.
| Very different compared to a year ago. Same for friends
| from the US and especially the UK.
| brokensegue wrote:
| are you unaware of major layoffs at major employers?
| Insanity wrote:
| There are plenty of jobs (and recruiters) still reaching
| out. Just for smaller companies than the tech giants.
| speeder wrote:
| Nobody is reaching out to me... and I don't even see job
| openings I can send my resume anymore.
|
| For example if go to "who is hiring" and do a search for
| c++ I find almost nothing. The few c++ Jobs that do exist
| require you to already live nearby because they can't
| offer relocation assistance or VISA sponsorship.
|
| Meanwhile same search years ago I would find plenty of
| cool openings to send my resume to.
|
| I am not even getting recruiter spam anymore where people
| offer me jobs that are unrelated to my skillset.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| As someone laid off from a smaller company, I've been
| competing for those jobs with the people laid off from
| the tech giants - for almost half a year now.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Same here. I think this month marks over 6months. What's
| stranger is I don't even see jobs in job boards anymore,
| at least not ones that don't look shady. Most of what I
| see now on say... LinkedIn is spam postings from iffy
| looking recruiting firms and consultancies.
| Alupis wrote:
| A lot of previous mega-corp SE's have unrealistic ideas
| of what normal salaries should be, leading to them being
| rejected based off salary demand, or rejecting offers
| themselves.
|
| No, you aren't going to be paid $450k a year to work on
| our website... that is fantasy land.
|
| There's so many tech jobs available at all sizes of
| companies, including mega-corps you've never heard of -
| they're just not as sexy as your FAANG's & co.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Nice try, but I've never worked at or even considered
| FAANG jobs.
| Alupis wrote:
| Fair, then you shouldn't have much trouble locating a
| decent job if you're in the tech and/or software field.
| Despite FAANG layoffs, the field is booming.
|
| Plenty of insurance companies, restaurant conglomerates,
| car dealership conglomerates, banks, manufacturing
| companies, big-AG, medicine, commercial property
| management companies - not to mention all the consulting
| companies adjacent to nearly every industry imaginable.
| They all need tech...
|
| Tech != FAANG, was the point.
| brewdad wrote:
| There are plenty of job postings. I'm doubtful as to how
| many of them urgently need to be filled.
| nawgz wrote:
| Are you implying that companies that grew by a factor of
| two during COVID laying off 10% of their staff means that
| software is no longer eating the world?
|
| There are endless dev jobs, the market's a little softer
| for pay thanks to megacap collusion once again, but I see
| an endless list of jobs online...
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Have you tried actually job hunting at the moment? The
| listings don't respond.
| nawgz wrote:
| Haha, recruiters have that problem with me. But fair
| enough, perhaps it's also more location dependent.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Those have been mostly non-dev roles
| devnullbrain wrote:
| They're already hiring again
| michaelt wrote:
| If ExampleCo laid off 1000 javascript developers last
| week and is trying to hire 20 ML developers this week,
| then it's true to say they're hiring again, but it's
| _also_ true that it can be hard for a dev to find a job.
| pizzaknife wrote:
| just curious - is there a real world scenario where a
| company has 1k "javascript" developers and can also lay
| them off without crippling their position in a given
| market?
|
| follow up - what market and which company(FAANG counts
| but must be a single org)?
|
| edit: down votes. look i get the math but who laid off 1k
| js devs?
| moffkalast wrote:
| > "But, especially right now, it can be hard for a dev to
| find a comically overpaid FAANG job."
|
| I think that's what they meant
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Yeah. Go up to that corporation and say: Do Better,
| capitalists, or I'm walkin' out that door!
| junon wrote:
| When your best talent leaves you without any recourse,
| and onboarding new talent takes 3-6+ months, they will
| _definitely_ start to care. My last company is imploding
| due to this _exact_ scenario. They didn 't want to listen
| to their experts and are now reaping those particular
| rewards.
| brewdad wrote:
| I guess the questions remains, will the management that
| caused your last company to implode take the right
| lessons with them to their next job?
| junon wrote:
| Almost certainly not, no.
| slg wrote:
| This only protects "your best talent". The company is
| free to mistreat all the rest of the people who don't
| have the unique skill set to guarantee themselves better
| treatment. That is capitalism working as intended.
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| America is built on the exploitation of undocumented workers
| for the food supply and of cheaper foreign labor held hostage
| by employers for tech. These are forms of coercion much as
| tying health insurance to employment. Tools of power to keep
| employees at a disadvantage.
| sgregnt wrote:
| For tech, I think this is a win-win situation. Tech workers
| have the options to stay and work in their home country. It
| is not like tech workers do not have a choice they prefer
| it this alternative, even given the uncertainty or not
| having a permanent residency.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| There are undocumented workers in every industry, getting
| exploited in a hundred different little ways. Some
| political factions have done very well out of creating a
| caste of legal untouchables.
| morkalork wrote:
| While the USA exploits undocumented workers in
| agriculture etc., its not like being documented is a huge
| step up either. In Canada, there's a whole (sub) class of
| legally imported labour under the "Temporary Foreign
| Worker" program that's exploited in a similar way.
| gabereiser wrote:
| This. OMG this. This has happened to me twice in my career.
| It's as if everyone has FAANG money or are like the tenured
| people who have a large amount of equity to tap into.
| dheera wrote:
| And this is exactly why people congregate in places like
| Silicon Valley and New York. If you lose your job there's a 98%
| chance you can find another job you like within commuting
| distance.
|
| For people in relationships it also means both people being
| able to pursue a wide spectrum of changes in their careers
| without moving, and one person don't need their partner to make
| a sacrifice in their career to pursue change.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| This is the purpose of relocation and signing bonuses. Give
| them a sunk cost to second guess both the hire and the fire.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>There's a fundamental disconnect between how hard it is to
| relocate and how easy it is to lose your job.
|
| Exactly!
|
| Plus, if you already have a house, you probably have refinanced
| into a low-rate mortgage which itself has enormous value
| contrasted with dropping it for a higher-rate mortgage on a new
| home. Even a new apartment lease will likely entail higher
| costs.
|
| Plus the expense and time of moving.
|
| Except for workers basically just out of college and making a
| major upgrade in title and pay, I cannot see anyone moving for
| a new job unless there is a hard written contract with
| liquidated damages if fired/laid-off (and very tight
| specifications on being fired for cause).
|
| Employers' behavior over the past several decades has simply
| eradicated any credibility they once had.
| shams93 wrote:
| In my experience the more experience you have the worse you get
| treated, and economic headwinds are constant and continual, on
| top of that they're getting ready to cut people off of food
| stamps they're so confidant in this economy while intentionally
| shutting it down literally it makes you crazy, it makes you
| homeless.
| Mizoguchi wrote:
| Are there still people relocating just for a job?Purely
| observational but the people I know willing to relocated (or
| already gone) it's mainly because they want to move out of the
| city, due to weather, crime, lack of things to do,
| infrastructure or whatever their reason is. I know there are
| exceptions where the opportunity, the money or both is so good
| that if offsets the risk of things not working out. But the
| vast majority of people changes companies to a slightly better
| position with a slightly better compensation.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I don't think it's quite that, it was the pandemic and forced
| remote work.
|
| Broadly what I saw is before the pandemic, employers reserved
| "remote work" for a select few, the boss gets to stay in his
| city and work from home, but you have to relocate. Anytime you
| would bring this up with your employer they would just go "well
| we just don't know [what would happen if you went remote]".
|
| The pandemic flipped that on it's head because now everyone was
| working from home and realizing that most jobs could be done
| remotely. Now that employer can't tell you that same line
| before, because everyone knows the game is up, everyone knows
| you can be equally productive remote as you can in the office,
| so employees are calling the bluff.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > you can be equally productive remote
|
| Oh, but then you'll miss out on all of those "random hallway
| conversations where the real 'innovation' occurs".
| abeppu wrote:
| I think we have to acknowledge that multiple causes are at
| play. The graph in the article shows a strong decrease from
| the late '80s to the pre-pandemic period. There's a further
| decrease from the 2018-2020 bar to the 2021 bar, and another
| drop between the 2022 bar and the Q1 2023 bar.
|
| I think the drop from the 80s to the pre-pandemic years is
| reflective of both greater precarity in employment and
| increases in housing costs in markets with lots of job
| opportunities.
|
| The drop from pre-pandemic to 2021 may certainly be because
| of the greater share of remote-work that you're citing;
| people relocated, but often _in spite of_ work.
|
| I think the gap between 2022 and early 2023 has gotta be at
| least partly due to the combination of greater economic
| uncertainty/increased recession fears and high costs to move
| b/c of high interest rates.
|
| We wouldn't have gone from 29% to 1.6% without multiple
| factors swinging together over time.
| goostavos wrote:
| >calling the bluff
|
| Maybe at smaller companies, and... _for now_. I 'm placing
| bets that mega-corps will be back to 5 days/week by the end
| of the year. If "hallway conversations" are a reason for 3
| days per week, then "the data" will show that 5 days leads to
| more hallway conversations. Managers want to see their
| empire. Smaller companies will do what they always do: copy
| bigger companies.
|
| Maybe I'm at peak cynicism, but I suspect we'll end up back
| where we started. A very small number of remote-first
| companies (that have always been remote-first), and then
| everyone else. Big corps will say remote didn't work, despite
| all evidence to the contrary.
| brewdad wrote:
| Agreed. I do think we will end up at a higher plateau of
| remote work than we had pre-pandemic but all signs point
| towards the vast majority of workers returning to an office
| daily. I do truly believe office work is more productive
| than remote for most workers. I also truly believe that the
| executives leading the charge to return to offices
| overstate that impact.
| blacksqr wrote:
| Normalize employment contracts guaranteeing a year of salary as
| a condition of relocation.
| danaris wrote:
| That would be a massive improvement over what we have now,
| but even having to move within a year after your last move is
| difficult, expensive, and incredibly stressful.
| crazygringo wrote:
| To play devil's advocate -- you have to think about bad
| actors though.
|
| What if that makes someone think, I can do zero work at my
| job and I'll get paid regardless? Or they do a super bare
| minimum, being incredibly unhelpful to everyone and their
| whole team hates them?
|
| Now you're going to have courts deciding what constitutes
| grounds for firing and what doesn't, if performance was above
| or below a super bare minimum, how that's defined for a
| programming job, etc.
| ttymck wrote:
| Firing becomes dismissal with generous severance. Europe
| seems to do just fine.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| But what if executives could just pressure workers to do
| more and more for less because they know about the
| fundamental difference between how hard it is for workers
| to relocate compared to companies finding new workers?
| _strokes chin_ Oh wait that's already the reality.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Then the company is out a year's worth of one employee's
| salary and has hopefully learned to put a little more
| effort into vetting their potential hires. Investments have
| risk, including investments in human resources.
| danwee wrote:
| It works in plenty of countries all around the world. Not
| sure why it couldn't work in the USA.
| mhh__ wrote:
| There would obviously be fine print.
|
| > Now you're going to have courts deciding what constitutes
| grounds for firing and what doesn't
|
| Courts are slow and cumbersome, but also mostly designed
| for this purpose. Any notion of a bad actor would be a
| legal one eventually.
| discreditable wrote:
| > I can do zero work at my job and I'll get paid
| regardless? Or they do a super bare minimum, being
| incredibly unhelpful to everyone and their whole team hates
| them?
|
| Lots of people already do this.
| jstarfish wrote:
| There is no point in playing devil's advocate when the
| practice in dispute is evil to begin with.
|
| Laying people off after coercing them to abandon stable
| means of sustenance is indefensible. The devil doesn't need
| sympathy.
| crazygringo wrote:
| There absolutely is when solutions might have unintended
| consequences.
|
| And the practice isn't usually _evil_ , just horrible
| planning. Companies aren't usually hiring people
| _knowing_ they 'll fire them. Rather it's company-wide
| layoffs or something, and the manager is as surprised as
| the employee.
|
| So it's important to look at tradeoffs rather than just
| declare that one side is evil.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| The points against Devil's Advocacy are actually entirely
| antithetical to the practice. The reason there is such an
| Advocate is to make arguments more substantive so it's
| not this circular reasoning of "it's Evil, therefore it's
| Bad".
|
| I don't otherwise disagree with what you say but the
| point is actually to require people to think and come up
| with strong reasons to disagree (or agree, as it might
| go).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Now you're going to have courts deciding what constitutes
| grounds for firing and what doesn't
|
| You mean, like they already do (ultimately, with
| administrative agencies as a first line) because of public
| unemployment insurance?
| somsak2 wrote:
| what's the problem with bare minimum? i get paid the bare
| minimum my company is willing to give me. it cuts both
| ways.
| sosuke wrote:
| I guess the clause in the contract would mean a leap of
| faith by the company that they have vetted the candidate
| and trust the outcome. They just have to evaluate the risk
| of bad actors against the gain from good actors. Actually I
| like this as it makes the hiring company put some skin in
| the game.
| blacksqr wrote:
| Would you destroy your professional reputation and make
| yourself unemployable for one year's worth of salary?
| tomp wrote:
| As an employee, I face exactly the same risks - psycho
| boss, unproductive team members, stupid leadership,
| fraudulent CFO, company about to die, market crash... a lot
| of these are impossible to know before starting the job.
|
| The difference is, of course, the company can afford the
| risk. The have hundreds/thousands of employees. You have
| one job.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| The Netherlands have a system in place to handle these sort
| of problems. When hiring anyone a contract is signed
| stating a minimum length of employment. If an employee is
| to be fired before that minimum length is up, a meeting
| with a mediator (typically an employment judge) is held.
| The company has to prove they've tried everything to get
| the employee to work at their expectations (re-training,
| moving departments, etc). If the judge determines the
| employee is doing more harm than good at the company, then
| they are let go before their contract ends.
|
| Granted, I don't think a judge needs to be the deciding
| factor on letting an employee stay or go. But I do believe
| a contract stating expectations, a minimum employment
| contract (if employee meets those expectations) is
| necessary and should be enforced in today's business world.
| Even apply it to salaried, or "skilled workers". A busboy
| at a restaurant doesn't need a contract, but an accountant
| with 5 years experience should at least have that safety
| net.
| theodric wrote:
| Speaking as someone who has had two employment contracts
| in the Netherlands: what? Both of mine had 30-day
| probation, termination with immediate effect servable by
| either party, zero recourse. Is this something new since
| 2019?
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| A NL company can let someone go without notice during a
| trial period, gross negligence, or when the employee
| resigns due to breach of contract on the employers part.
|
| By default, the notice period depends on the length of
| the contract (statutory minimum is 1 month notice,
| longest is 6 months). But it does allow companies to
| establish their own notice periods (or no notice period)
| as long as both parties agree.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| It's almost amazing to me that CEOs have all these ideas for
| how to hire and retain but never once consider the very
| things they demand to be hired and retained. Almost like they
| think of the rest of us as not real people.
| [deleted]
| geodel wrote:
| Nothing amazing about. CEO retain lawyers to draft custom
| contracts with a company before taking offer. This is
| mutually agreed negotiation and neither company nor job
| seeker is obliged to agree to such negotiation.
|
| No one is stopping you from trying it.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Sure, and the next time a tech ceo goes whining to
| Congress about a shortage of workers I hope my
| congressman tells him that no one is stopping him from
| mutually agreed negotiations with candidates.
| geodel wrote:
| That too is fine. Congressman is listening to lot of
| constituents. Nothing wrong in taking your message at
| higher precedence than CEOs.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Too many of them think they are doing us a favor by
| allowing us to work for them at glorious random company
| rather than realizing that glorious random company has no
| value outside of its employees.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| CEOs play checkers with people. Every piece is identical
| and thus very easy to dehumanize. I'd bet the best direct
| managers you ever had were playing chess, actually trying
| to understand the difference between people and how to best
| apply them. This difference is both required, because of
| scale, and inexcusable at the same time.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| There's truly a different set of rules & norms, once you're
| high enough up the social-status ladder.
|
| That used to include the so-called "professional class" but
| the story of the intersection between social status and
| work for the last few decades has been MBA types pushing
| those positions downward,and preventing them from ever
| rising, in the software world. They may not be doing it
| consciously, but a lot of stuff about work-life for
| software folks _sure looks like_ what you 'd do if you
| wanted to squash the social status of a cohort that earns
| enough money that they'd otherwise be on their way to solid
| membership in the upper-middle, like micro-managy
| "methodologies", avoiding giving us personal offices,
| widespread and oft-expressed but IME rarely-accurate
| stereotypes about software folks necessarily being bad at
| everything except fiddly computer shit, and the way
| interviews are run.
|
| Professors and doctors were two big groups that held high
| status and had a fair amount of freedom and trust to run
| their own affairs, once they'd paid their dues, but both
| those worlds have been invaded by MBAs who've taken over
| running everything and brought the same contempt for "mere"
| workers that we see in the rest of the business world.
| AFAIK lawyers have held them off, so far, but I may just
| not be aware of MBA-ification there.
| naravara wrote:
| What you're calling "MBA-ification" sounds more like
| private equity infiltration.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| its a package deal
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Law firms, in most states, are forbidden to have
| ownership in the hands of non-lawyers (there's some minor
| exceptions dealing with inheritance.)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Law firms, in most states, are forbidden to have
| ownership in the hands of non-lawyers
|
| Good. The rest of us are idiots
| badpun wrote:
| Looks like the lawyers were able to defend themselves
| because they, well, write the laws.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Good idea. Sometimes this is a large signing bonus. It could
| pay out over time but vest immediately on a layoff or
| something.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| As the ideal employee in a 90's Dilbert strip (from the boss's
| perspective) said, "having a personal life is like stealing
| from the company". There's yet another headline on this site
| today about falling birthrates, and I can't help but wonder
| about the connection.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| "Having any dedication outside your company is stealing from
| your company. Now here's an advertisement showing you the
| excitement of cheating on your partner for some quick fun."
| May not be causation, but they sure are eager to not let a
| good crisis go to waste.
|
| Funny thing is, at least a few decades ago companies realized
| having a good employee's kid come work for them was a boon.
| Now they complain about the lack of good workers without
| thinking about the consequences of their good workers not
| reproducing in stable families.
| jandrese wrote:
| If you are a homeowner it is almost insane to move. Most people
| I know could not afford their house if they were buying it
| today. Often by a huge margin. Moving would mean becoming a
| renter again and losing a much larger chunk of their paycheck
| every month to housing. It's too late to start a whole new 30
| year mortgage, even when you account for the proceeds from
| selling their existing house. Prices are insane. This is a
| natural consequence of home prices doubling or tripling over
| the past 10 years.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| You don't start from scratch. You sell your existing house,
| which has benefited from inflation, then buy somewhere with
| the same mortgage payment over the same remaining duration
| you had if you choose not to trade up.
|
| Yes there are significant transaction costs but it isn't as
| though you are starting again with your housing equity.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > You sell your existing house, which has benefited from
| inflation, then buy somewhere with the same mortgage
| payment over the same remaining duration you had if you
| choose not to trade up
|
| Are you living under a rock? Mortgage rates going up make
| that impossible.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| > You sell your existing house, which has benefited from
| inflation
|
| Your new interest rate is going to absolutely demolish any
| inflation benefit your current house has. I don't think
| people really understand how bad higher interest rates are
| when there's a housing shortage.
|
| - A $500k house at 3% is $2,100/month.
|
| - A $500k house at 7.5% is $3,500/month
|
| - That's a difference of nearly $17,000/year
|
| The house that was $500k at 3% in 2021 is still $500k at
| 7.5% in 2023. Housing prices haven't budged. We'd need to
| see a 20-40% reduction in prices across the board to
| stabilize affordability, but that won't happen because
| there's too much demand.
| pcbro141 wrote:
| Interest rates.
| jnosCo wrote:
| Interest rates doubling over the past year change the math
| on this. For instance, to keep my same mortgage payment,
| even with significant equity, i could only afford what I
| paid for the house originally, which would be a significant
| downgrade in today's market.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| Lots of people have made that point, but I'll respond
| here.
|
| Yes this is true, but only at this point in time when
| interest rates have shot up from historically low. Most
| of the time this won't be the case, and soon this effect
| could work in the other way in that you could move to a
| house of similar value for a lower cost if interest rates
| come down.
|
| And the 30 year fixed rate mortgage is unique to the US.
| Here in the UK, we only fix for 2-5 years typically.
|
| So easy on the downvotes!
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Do people expect interest rates to lower again any time
| soon? Inflation just recently started trending down.
|
| Right now US supply has shrunk so prices don't seem to be
| declining enough to offset the rise in interest rates;
| the monthly payments for anything in the market are still
| eye-watering even factoring in price declines.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Well if you expect them to rise or stay the same for a
| while then now is actually not a bad time to buy.
| nradov wrote:
| It is actually pretty much the case for most US
| homeowners. Everyone I know refinanced their mortgages
| when interest rates were lower. I got a 2.874% 30 year
| fixed rate mortgage in 2021 which was a great deal, but
| now I am essentially stuck here. There's no way I can
| afford to move. Existing home sales volume is way down.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/low-mortgage-rates-home-
| sales-l...
|
| https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_existing_home_sales
|
| The situation may be different in other countries.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| You wrote: There's no way I can afford
| to move.
|
| You are lucky to win the housing lottery. Congrats! Can
| you imagine being a young couple (20s 30s) trying to buy
| your first home the US right now? Hopeless. Wait a few
| years as an oppressed renter!
| nradov wrote:
| Yes, I am lucky in many ways. But the US home ownership
| rate is 65%, so it's hardly a lottery. Many young couples
| are buying homes in lower cost states like Utah,
| Minnesota, and Ohio. HN users focusing on California
| often have a distorted perspective on the situation out
| in the real world.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I am very symphathetic to this issue for UK borrowers.
| They face _way_ too much interest rate volatility. There
| is a gambling effect in the UK about housing.
|
| Are you aware that 30-fixed in the US is essentially
| gov't backed via three mega pseudo-gov't guaranteed orgs
| called Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie Mae? It is great for
| increasing home ownership and utterly oppressive to low
| income people renting. It is tough.
|
| I cannot believe that more countries do not (politically)
| prioritise a similar system: Cheap, fixed 30-year'ish
| home mortgages. To be clear, I'm not saying this is
| economically ideal, but it is great for your political
| party!
| nonethewiser wrote:
| That assumes you started your mortgage in roughly the
| last 10-15 years in the US or somewhere else with the
| same rate history. Average rates before then were
| consistently higher.
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US
|
| If you started your mortgage before then its a neutral to
| positive rate-wise.
| giaour wrote:
| Many holders of higher rate mortgages refinanced during
| the last 10-15 years, too.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > even with significant equity
|
| Yep, and if you fell for one of your lender's incessant
| pitches on borrowing on your equity or refinancing and
| taking equity out, you're really locked in to your
| situation. I'm very convinced that most people doing home
| equity loans or refis with cash out don't understand how
| much they are backsliding when they do that.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think that depends on what they did with the cash. If
| they invested it in the S&P 500, that was generally a
| very good trade. If they turned it into new cars and
| expensive vacations, well, that was hopefully something
| that they really enjoyed, because those are things that
| are even more expensive when financed.
| subsubzero wrote:
| agree, what really makes me upset is how housing prices
| in certain areas has not gone down at all given that
| rates are double what they were a year or 2 ago. The un-
| affordability is beyond reason.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is just supply and demand. Supply is half of what it
| used to be.
|
| https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvX
| sEg...
|
| https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2023/05/housing-
| may-15th-...
|
| The supply demand situation is probably even worse in
| high demand areas.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Prices are sticky and people are way more emotional when
| it comes pricing their home than other things.
|
| Those who refuse to sell now are just keeping up the
| price for the ones who do sell. If the price is not
| sustainable ot will go down.
| mediaman wrote:
| You are generally right, but currently most homeowners have
| mortgage debt at rates far below market, so they could
| afford much less house than before (if they need
| financing).
| arka2147483647 wrote:
| If you move from not-so-prosperous place to where its
| booming, there is no way you get equivalent home for the
| same price
| substation13 wrote:
| If the prices have significantly risen since you purchased
| (as they have for most buyers) then moving even to the same
| quality of house makes you a net buyer because you need to
| take on more financing.
|
| Remember, the day you buy a house, you are no richer. This
| is because the asset (house) is offset by the liability
| (the mortgage).
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I don't understand.
|
| I buy a house with a $300k mortgage. The price rises to
| $500k. I then sell the house and buy another for $500k,
| rolling my $200k equity and $300k mortgage for no net
| change.
|
| If you are trading up then yes, the more expensive house
| rose faster than your house. But that's the case anytime
| you move and not unique to a job relocation.
| silisili wrote:
| In addition to the other great comment about rates
| affecting prices, don't forget deep cleaning the house,
| staging it, paying a 'licensed professional' to fix what
| the buyer inspection may find, then 6% in realtor fees,
| then taxes, potentially a lot if you haven't been there
| two years. In no event will you be rolling $200k equity
| over in that scenario.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| What you're missing is that the after (optimistically)
| netting 200k from a 300k house, is that the next house is
| really a lateral move to another 300k house being sold
| for 500k, but with higher property taxes (At least in
| states like CA).
|
| This would only theoretically work going from a HCOL area
| to a lower one, and then moving again becomes even
| harder.
| nradov wrote:
| Nope, there is a huge net change because interest rates
| have increased. Mortgage rates bottomed out in 2020 at
| about 2.65%, so the monthly payment on a $300K mortgage
| was only $1209. Now at 5.87% the payment would be $1774.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US
| woobar wrote:
| Why are you comparing to the absolute minimum? Didn't
| people use to have mortgages before 2020? My first house
| was close to $300K, mortgage was 6.5%. No one was crying
| about this back then.
| nradov wrote:
| I am comparing to the absolute minimum because most
| homeowners with decent credit ratings refinanced their
| loans a couple years ago near the minimum. Now they can't
| afford to sell their current homes and buy in a different
| area because the monthly payments would be unaffordable
| (unless they buy in a much cheaper area or a much smaller
| home).
|
| I don't think anyone is crying about it but this is
| reducing labor mobility and slowing down economic growth.
| It's one of the unintended consequences of the Federal
| Reserve raising interest rates due to inflation.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| What if you bought a the peak and the house price falls?
| Negative equity, right?
| balls187 wrote:
| That isn't even remotely true here in the Seattle area.
|
| Even if you have significant equity in your house, the
| supply of "better" comparable homes is sparse _at best_.
|
| And likely your existing mortgage is at a rate 1/2 of the
| current rates.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > You don't start from scratch. You sell your existing
| house, which has benefited from inflation, then buy
| somewhere with the same mortgage payment over the same
| remaining duration you had if you choose not to trade up.
|
| In California, Prop 13 means that property taxes are
| essentially fixed and nonincreasing at the time you
| purchase your house.
|
| This is sometimes used as a defense of Prop 13, but all it
| really means is that any increase in total tax burden has
| to fall disproportionately (in fact, almost exclusively) on
| new purchasers and their tenants.
|
| Forcing someone to relocate means giving up that privileged
| tax status and starting over "from scratch".
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Wouldn't that be priced into the relocation package you
| negotiate? It is a problem but no different than buying a
| home in a flood plain, if it's something you have to do.
|
| Or maybe not, I have never negotiated relocation and the
| only industry I have to base an example off of is oil and
| gas and they pay ridiculous amounts of money so you get a
| comparable house/mortgage to your old one
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Wouldn't that be priced into the relocation package you
| negotiate? It is a problem but no different than buying a
| home in a flood plain, if it's something you have to do.
|
| I can't imagine a relocation package pricing in
| _foregone_ tax benefits.
|
| But even if it did, that's a one-time payment in exchange
| for giving up a benefit that exists in perpetuity. There
| are ways in accounting to discount the benefit of
| indefinite/perpetual annuities and compare them against
| current cash value, and in practice they almost _always_
| undervalue the former, often by limiting the future time
| window.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| There is one limited exception: once you're 55, you can
| transfer your existing property tax base (but only if the
| county you're moving to allows it), but only once.
|
| This is a ridiculous system, and there really needs to be
| property tax reform in CA, but it needs to be done in
| such a way that it doesn't fuck over existing property
| owners, which is really difficult.
| triceratops wrote:
| End Prop 13 protections for all property purchases. Stop
| grandfathering in existing property when it's inherited.
| It'll _really_ fuck over new buyers in the short-term.
| But it 's one way to get less resistance from existing
| owners - who are largely voters. And the skyrocketing
| property taxes on new purchases might put a damper on
| prices.
| nradov wrote:
| One of the main reasons behind Proposition 13 was to
| constrain rapid growth of local government expenses, and
| it has been effective in that. We do need to reform it so
| that the tax burden is distributed more fairly, but I
| won't vote for ending it without some guarantees on
| limiting government spending.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > but it needs to be done in such a way that it doesn't
| fuck over existing property owners
|
| This is impossible. The current system is such an extreme
| and unsustainable transfer of wealth towards property
| owners that there's no way to create a sustainable (let
| alone equitable) system that doesn't involve current
| property owners giving something up.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| This is entirely dependent on which market you are moving
| from and to. Within the same market it's a wash on average.
| From a more expensive market to a cheaper market you are
| coming out ahead. Your conundrum really only applies when
| going from a cheaper market to a more expensive market.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| >If you are a homeowner it is almost insane to move.
|
| I own a home and moved. I rent in the new city and let my
| mother live in the house I own, that way I don't have to sell
| it. If I ever want to go back I won't have any issues doing
| so.
| balderdash wrote:
| Would she pay rent?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Depending how many siblings one has, it may be a matter
| of pay now or pay later.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes and that's very anecdotal. I also moved a rented out my
| home to my son and two of his friends we trust. If he comes
| up on hard times for a month or two, I don't have an
| emotional issue with covering his rent. If it was a
| stranger, I would.
|
| If he gets to a point where he couldn't pay rent because of
| a systemic problem, I trust him well enough to know that he
| wouldn't make me go through a long eviction process. He
| would have to move. But we would help him find sone place
| cheaper. No for logistical reasons, he couldn't stay with
| us.
|
| But my wife and I said, that once they move, we are selling
| the house. We do not want to be landlords.
| trashface wrote:
| This is me. House is paid off, and has appreciated, so I can
| move to...where exactly? The only place with affordable
| housing is Dystopia US.
| gen220 wrote:
| You should do a roadtrip! Dystopia US has some nice
| pockets. Affordable is all relative, of course.
|
| It's pretty much impossible to "win" in housing unless
| you're investing major sweat equity, or factoring-in
| intangibles like satisfaction with a like-minded community
| or peace of mind.
| [deleted]
| felideon wrote:
| > becoming a renter again and losing a much larger chunk of
| their paycheck every month to housing
|
| Except it is now cheaper to rent than to own[1].
|
| If you have to move for a job, you rent for at least a year
| if not a few years as you get a feeling your job stability.
| Of course, the main point stands that you can be fired at any
| time, which is why you never buy a house when affordability
| is at an all-time low since the crash[2].
|
| [1] https://jbrec.com/insights/demand-shifting-from-owning-
| to-re...
|
| [2] https://www.atlantafed.org/center-for-housing-and-
| policy/dat...
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| >Except it is now cheaper to rent than to own[1].
|
| Real estate is entirely local, such that making broad
| generalizations like this is detrimental. In some markets
| it may be better to rent, in others it is better to buy.
| Regardless of the cost, availability is also a factor - in
| my market, you might as well buy if you are qualified, as
| the market for rental properties is even tighter than
| buying and rents have increased faster than home prices.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Except it is now cheaper to rent than to own
|
| I've noticed that over the long haul (in my area, anyway),
| it's neither cheaper nor more expensive to rent vs own. In
| the short term, one can be more expensive than the other,
| though.
|
| But the big difference is that you're building equity if
| you're buying, and you're not if you're renting. So which
| is better, financially speaking, depends a lot on what
| you're trying to accomplish.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| > But the big difference is that you're building equity
| if you're buying, and you're not if you're renting.
|
| You build equity when you are renting, just not in the
| housing market.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| spacemadness wrote:
| If this is a homeowners perspective, imagine how the current
| renting class feels. Something will boil over eventually.
| dehrmann wrote:
| People can't afford to move because higher interest rates
| decreased the value of their home, so especially if they
| bought recently, a lot of their down payment is gone.
|
| This is actually advantageous to first-time buyers since
| higher interest rates (and lower prices) mean their down
| payments go further.
| bpicolo wrote:
| Except the prices haven't actually lowered meaningfully.
| They're sitting at March 2022 levels, which is still way,
| way up from Jan 2020.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| But that makes the assumption that the higher interest
| rates aren't lowering supply by keeping homes off the
| market. I have a decently sized home (2300 sq ft) but had
| wanted to move onto something around 3500 sq ft and pay a
| new mortgage in proportion to the bigger home. Of course
| the interest rates increase would have been paying like
| 2.5 times what I'm currently paying so it is a no brained
| for me to stay put. On the other hand, no one in my
| neighborhood is moving anymore so nothing is available
| and prices remain pretty close to their peak. So at least
| where I am, we now have high purchase prices and even
| much higher monthly mortgages.
| oblio wrote:
| I'm curious as a non-American.
|
| How big is your family? I can't fathom needing a 360 sqm
| house except if I had 3+ kids.
|
| Also... how do you clean it all? How much is heating,
| cooling, etc?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| _Generally_ , heating and cooling are a lot cheaper in
| USA (thank you cheap natgas, and solar if you can do it).
|
| Cleaning... a lot of the space goes unused or just stores
| stuff so it doesn't get too dirty or people don't care as
| much outside core areas. Central HVAC helps keep the dust
| down a bit vs. dead air and radiators.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The average size of a new build in the US is almost 260@
| square feet.
|
| https://www.nahb.org/blog/2022/03/new-single-family-home-
| siz...
|
| The smallest home my builder was building when we were
| looking was 3100 square feet. It was $335K in 2016.
|
| As far as what a family did with a 5 bedroom 3.5 bath
| house. Bedroom for me and my wife, bedroom for my son,
| guest bedroom with a bath, office, and gym. There was
| another room that was converted to a dance studio for my
| wife.
|
| We did downsize late last year and now we stay in a 1300
| square foot condo.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Speaking for myself, the primary draw of larger houses
| are more spaces dedicated to particular
| tasks/hobbies/etc. So it might not be square footage
| that's the goal but the higher number of rooms that
| usually comes with that.
|
| For example my house is ~1800sqft which is very
| comfortable and a massive upgrade over the apartments I
| used to live in that were half as large, but as someone
| who works from home it'd be nice to have one more room
| than my house has to use exclusively as an office to
| maintain mental partitioning between work and downtime.
| Similarly it might be nice for my garage to be a bit
| bigger so I could better fit in a "workshop corner".
|
| Is that sort of thing _needed_? Absolutely not and many
| get along just fine with far less, but it 'd still be a
| welcome quality of life upgrade.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Except that there are far fewer houses to buy because
| nobody who already has one is willing to sell it for such
| a loss.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| And the problem for that is most people can only have
| "wealth" if they have a home. Because the salaries have
| been stagnant since the 70s and the cost of
| living/existing has sky rocketed. So for most people they
| only way/dream they have to at least maintain the
| standard of living is to either inherit their parents
| home or sell it.
|
| And all this is sponsored by the banks and governments
| because of interest payments and money from taxes.
|
| It's absolutely ridiculous some 80yo shack costs half a
| million dollars/pounds/euros. There is no justification
| for it from a technical perspective.
| badpun wrote:
| > Because the salaries have been stagnant since the 70s
| and the cost of living/existing has sky rocketed.
|
| I couldn't find info about salaries per se, but average
| hourly wage in the US increased by around 800% since
| 1970.
| logicfiction wrote:
| and the median nominal US home value is up 1728% since
| 1970[1].
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
| sn9 wrote:
| With how easy investing in index funds is these days,
| that's no longer true.
|
| You can build wealth more reliably and cheaply with
| automatic transfers to a target date fund than hoping any
| given real estate market takes off.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| A lot of the value is tied up in the land, because they
| aren't really making any more of it, and location is
| everything. You could maybe move out to the middle of the
| desert surrounded by miles of nothing and get cheaper
| property, but then you have to figure out where you get
| the basics of life, like food, water, electric.
|
| Remote work has disrupted countryside housing markets
| too, since workers moving in make much higher salaries
| than locals, who often lack the skills for picking up
| those jobs. A trickle out of metro areas in the millions
| is a tsunami for towns with population in the thousands.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Also, local zoning and permitting in most big cities in
| the US keeps the supply of new homes at a tiny trickle,
| so there's no chance for prices to go down from increased
| supply.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Homeowners significantly outnumber renters among regular
| voters. Until and unless that changes policy is going to be
| by and for incumbent homeowners.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Hat tip to this post. Google tells me from searching "us
| percentage of home ownership": In 2022,
| the proportion of households which are occupied by owners
| stood at 65.9 percent.
|
| Source:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-
| rat...
|
| Renters are politically invisible in the United States
| due to the economic situation. Rent will continue to rise
| to unsustainable levels and nothing will done. As Charlie
| Munger (Berkshire Hathaway #2) says: "Show me the
| incentive and I'll show you the outcome."
| munificent wrote:
| _> Renters are politically invisible in the United States
| due to the economic situation._
|
| Given how razor thin election margins are, ~33% of the
| population is _far_ from a invisible class.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _~33% of the population is far from a invisible class_
|
| For a variety of reasons, "buying a home leads
| individuals to participate substantially more in local
| elections, on average" [1]. Outside New York City, which
| unsurprisingly has solid tenant protections, American
| renters do not vote as frequently.
|
| [1] https://andrewbenjaminhall.com/homeowner.pdf
| jandrese wrote:
| However, they are a class that is relatively easy to
| disenfranchise. In fact many already are since minorities
| who live in cities are far more likely to rent than the
| average suburban or rural voter and we already have
| plenty of systems in place to disenfranchise them.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they are a class that is relatively easy to
| disenfranchise_
|
| Correct. Dated, but related and a classic: "We find that
| neither demographic nor attitudinal attributes explain
| [people who have recently moved's] lower turnout.
| Instead, the requirement that citizens must register anew
| after each change in residence constitutes the key
| stumbling block in the trip to the polls. Since nearly
| one-third of the nation moves every two years, moving has
| a large impact on national turnout rates."
|
| The authors suggested "linking the maintenance of
| registration to an action that is usually an intrinsic
| part of moving" such as the "change-of-address notice at
| a local post office." Interestingly, "holding elections
| on Sunday, making election day a holiday, or extending
| the hours that the polls are open...are designed to
| facilitate people who are registered" and would thus "do
| little to improve turnout."
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-
| political-s...
| tmnvix wrote:
| > In 2022, the proportion of households which are
| occupied by owners stood at 65.9 percent.
|
| This is different from the proportion of adults in the US
| that own a home. Many non-homeowners live in an owner
| occupied residence.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| One solution to this that's being explored in several
| states is to move that policy to the state level, where
| the effect is less pronounced. (Participation rates are
| higher the higher-level an election is.)
| asdfman123 wrote:
| It is boiling over already in the form of newly emergent
| populism. Easy to ignore if you don't personally feel the
| pain, but many out there are very angry with the system.
| subsubzero wrote:
| We are in that boat now, Wife has an offer to move to San
| Diego area. We are homeowners in a 30 year fixed at 3.75% and
| moving back there is almost impossible due to rates being at
| > 6% and barely any houses on the market and prices which are
| close to what they were in 2022(we moved from that area in
| 2022). We are very close to saying F - it with her rescinding
| her offer, this economy and housing market is beyond bad.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Counter offer. Ask for a sufficiently large consternation
| and a 2 year severance should it not work out. Just like
| executives. They get a lot more.
| ironmagma wrote:
| What is "a consternation"? I've never heard this term and
| can't find it referenced anywhere.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Sorry about that. Typo. I meant, "compensation".
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I think it's autocorrect for compensation.
| neilv wrote:
| I'm ready for some FAANG total consternation.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Thank you! Yes, I meant compensation :).
| squokko wrote:
| considered renting down there and renting out your owned
| home?
| yardie wrote:
| I bought a home specifically so I don't have to deal with
| landlords and their own level of bullshit.
| giaour wrote:
| Signing a lease is a new, expensive obligation, and being
| a landlord is a second job. That approach might be right
| for some people, but it's definitely not the same as just
| selling your old house and buying a new one somewhere
| else.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Letting a property management company take care of things
| mitigates a lot (but not all) of that. They'll take a
| huge cut of the income, of course.
| chiph wrote:
| Obviously this depends on the location and the management
| company. Mine takes 50% of the first month's rent for
| finding & qualifying a new tenant, then 8% of the
| following rent payments. So far they have done a decent
| enough job - I just have to prod them on repairs to not
| use the absolute cheapest approach (my theory is a nicer
| house can justify a higher rent, vs. all the ones in the
| market that are run by corporate landlords and look like
| it)
| nradov wrote:
| It's common for property management companies to arrange
| for kickbacks with certain repair contractors. I'm not
| claiming that any particular management company is
| corrupt but I know of cases where this has happened and
| it's tough for absentee landlords to detect.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > to not use the absolute cheapest approach
|
| Can I just say -- you rock. I've been a renter my whole
| life (I prefer it that way), and I appreciate when the
| property owner steps in to keep property management
| companies from being total cheapskates with repairs. It
| makes sense -- it's the owner's investment, after all,
| and I don't mind paying a bit of a premium for a place
| that is well maintained.
| scarface74 wrote:
| And that still doesn't take care of vacancies and long
| eviction processes.
| hadlock wrote:
| "being a landlord is a second job" is something I hear a
| lot from renters, I've never heard this from an actual
| small time landlord who has two or less rental
| properties. And yeah, if you have 30%+ equity in your
| house you can generally have a property management
| company handle everything for perpetual 10% of the rent +
| first month's rent and come out even, in most competitive
| markets. Being a landlord in a low cost of living area,
| more than an hour from a major city is probably a losing
| proposition for most people under 50.
| astura wrote:
| My parents were landlords for almost 20 years. They owned
| a six family that we also lived in most of the time. It
| was a ton of work and they didn't make hardly anything
| after expenses. We had several cleanups that could be on
| the Hoarders TV show.
|
| My grandparents were landlords for like 50 years. They
| said they wouldn't be worth it if their children weren't
| doing all the work for free.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I had two properties. It was a second job.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I did exactly this. After a period of initial search I
| got some good tenants, and my only interaction with them
| is calling the plumber or something on their behalf every
| other month.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| My parents, others in my family, and a couple former co-
| workers have had a rental unit or two at one time or
| another. Exactly _one_ of those didn 't strongly advise
| against it, and that one said his situation was good
| _only_ because he 'd been careful to buy units where they
| were almost certainly going to go to nursing school
| students, who are likely to be relatively-stable, stick
| around for at least a couple years, _leave_ before long
| if they can 't pay anymore for some reason, and extremely
| unlikely to trash the place or try to run a meth lab out
| of it or anything like that. In all other cases the
| complaints are similar: the return on time and money
| invested is just way, way too low to be worth the risk &
| frustration.
|
| But, none of those engaged a property management company.
| Maybe that makes the difference.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| This is the real-economy, human tragedy routinely
| overlooked within the Fed's policy mistake of
| unsustainably forcing down long interest rates.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=14ImM
|
| Holders of big mortgages taken out at low rates are
| trapped in them, so they will continue to suffer in
| quality of life, and the economy will continue to suffer
| sub-optimal output as they try to adapt to work in
| captivity.
| 0zemp2c wrote:
| this is (no joke) why The Fed wants to engineer a
| recession
|
| job losses will trigger home sales by necessity, and the
| great mass of people with 3% mortgages will be unwedged
| by force
|
| same thing happened after 2008...the recession pushed
| people out of the best mortgages they ever had
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _this is (no joke) why The Fed wants to engineer a
| recession_
|
| No it doesn't. The Fed wants home values to go down. That
| can occur without job losses. (Which even now, largely
| aren't occurring outside tech.)
| mcast wrote:
| Rental prices in San Diego are almost as high as
| Fremont/San Jose (5th most expensive rental city in CA).
| Also, considering it has one of the highest electricity
| rates in the country, it makes renting even more
| expensive than just the monthly rate.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| How much electricity does one need in San Diego?
|
| Temperature highs are 19-25C year round and winter lows
| are around 10C.
|
| Barely need heating or cooling, just need to bump up the
| indoor average by a few degrees and that seems to be it.
|
| Other big loads would be a fridge and hot water, but
| those are getting pretty efficient.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I would rather have an anal probe with a cactus than ever
| be a landlord again. Vacancy, slow payers, maintenance,
| evictions that take forever, etc.
|
| Being a distant landlord is even worse. Yes you can get a
| property manager. But, then you have to pay them.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| If your home you bought 10 years ago doubled or tripped, why
| can't you move? You pocket the difference, put that down on
| the next over priced house, bringing your mortgage principal
| back down to the small mortgage you were paying 10 years ago
| on a cheap house. Ya, the rate is higher... But if you just
| made $600k on your $300k house, that you've paid down to
| $200k hopefully atleast... And you move and buy a house for
| the same $900k you just sold yours for, you only have a
| mortgage on $200k. Yes at a higher rate. And yes with higher
| property taxes. But hey, that's life. Don't move if it's not
| worth it. But it's not as impossible as you make it seem.
| CptFribble wrote:
| [removed by commenter due to incorrect information]
|
| apologies, I was misinformed. consider this comment
| retracted
| ipython wrote:
| that's incorrect. Generally speaking you don't pay
| capital gains on the first $250k ($500k if filing
| jointly) under IRS rules. You can also adjust the cost
| basis of your home by adding in any improvements you may
| have made to the house, so assuming you made any
| improvements at all, you can potentially make that
| exemption even higher.
|
| See https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc701.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| > Moving would mean becoming a renter again and losing a much
| larger chunk of their paycheck every month to housing
|
| The problem isn't that you're an existing homeowner. The
| problem is housing is exorbitant.
|
| Everyone has to pay out of the nose for housing. The only
| difference is that you have an asset that has appreciated
| significantly, and in a way you're indirectly receiving
| dividends from it in the form of affordable mortgage
| payments.
|
| But if you didn't have that house, you'd be in an even worse
| spot.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > Most people I know could not afford their house if they
| were buying it today
|
| How is that true if you moved to a place with an equivalent
| cost of living?
|
| I had my house built in the suburbs of Atlanta for $350K in
| metro Atlanta. It's now worth $650K. If I wanted to buy
| another house for $650K, I would sell my house. Get $300K in
| cash, use it for a down payment, and still have a $350K
| mortgage.
|
| Of course I'm ignoring selling costs, interest rate
| differences etc.
|
| I have a friend who located from Seattle to Atlanta. He also
| had a home in Seattle, he had $600K in equity that he was
| able to use to get a $900K house in Atlanta and have a $300K
| mortgage.
| simplone wrote:
| That and whoever had a mortgage before 2022 is not looking to
| go from 2-4% to 7% at the same high prices.
|
| Politicians and big business really fucked us with the whole
| money printer thing.
| cptroot wrote:
| Hey now. Spare a thought for the corporate goons who decided
| war-induced shortages was a good time to goose profits by an
| order of magnitude.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Citation needed that corporate profits are up by an order
| of magnitude.
| soLongThx4Phish wrote:
| Economics thought modeled after WW2, when the world outside
| the US was a crater.
|
| Boomers and GenX hypernormalized around a 70 year bubble.
|
| Like those at Exxon who accurately modeled climate warming
| in the 80s, the ecological cost, those who knew knew they'd
| be long dead before it became obvious.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| 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.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Pretty much. I moved to where the jobs are. If you want to
| hire me, move your office here.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| That is generally true. In other words, cities have more
| opportunities so people move there.
|
| Paradoxically if you build more housing, population
| increases, opportunities increase, and housing prices
| increase.
| lettergram wrote:
| [flagged]
| tclancy wrote:
| >many cities were burned down in 2020
|
| Which ones were those?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| kredd wrote:
| 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.
| Carrok wrote:
| AK-47 has been a strain since the 70s [1]. But sure,
| blame it on "bros".
|
| [1] https://2fast4buds.com/news/strain-history-ak-47
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| 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?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| In Pakistan in the 80s there was a weed strain called
| "Martial Law"
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Other interesting war/weapon related strain names:
|
| "KGB" [0] "Glock 19" [1] ".38 Special" [2] "Area 41" [3]
| "Crossbow" [4] "Grandpa's Gun Chest" [5] "Brown Bomber"
| (Grandma's Boy)
|
| [0] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-
| kgb-by-ki...
|
| [1] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-
| glock-19-...
|
| [2] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-
| review-38-specia...
|
| [3] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-
| area-41-b...
|
| [4] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/cultivar-review-
| crossbo...
|
| [5] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-
| grandpas-...
| Clubber wrote:
| Assault weed!
|
| /s
| treeman79 wrote:
| https://www.axios.com/2020/09/16/riots-cost-property-
| damage
|
| A lot of them. leaders using race baiting tactics to
| cause as much trouble as possible. Somehow rioters been
| exempt from needing social distancing.
| [deleted]
| busterarm wrote:
| While Portland wasn't burned down, it looks quite "bombed
| out" (and in the graffiti sense it is). Reminiscent of
| Manhattan in the early 80s.
|
| It's readily apparent areas in multiple cities that were
| thriving pre-COVID and now you wouldn't consider being
| alone in at night.
| flangola7 wrote:
| > many cities were burned down in 2020
|
| I don't ever recall seeing photos of numerous whole city
| blocks turned to ashes.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| My brother told my mother there were riots in the small
| city I live in.
|
| It was like twelve people laying on the road in front of
| the police station, as a "protest".
| sundaeofshock wrote:
| > many cities were burned down in 2020
|
| Really? Burned down implies thousands of buildings in a
| single city. The displacement of hundreds of thousands.
| Please, name one city where that happened.
| in3d wrote:
| 2100 businesses damaged or ransacked in Chicago.
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/investigations/ct-
| chicago-202...
|
| 700 buildings damaged, burnt, or destroyed in
| Minneapolis.
| https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/minnesota/news/minneapolis-
| issue...
|
| The scale of destructive rioting was massive and
| underreported at the time it was happening.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Context beyond the headline for the MSP article where 700
| buildings were damaged, burnt or destroyed:
|
| "cosmetic damage, minor damage, major damage, and wholly
| destroyed, which included 12 structures"
|
| Map: https://assets1.cbsnewsstatic.com/i/cbslocal/wp-
| content/uplo...
| jkestner wrote:
| Our house should meet that standard, by what the kids
| have done to it.
| gwd wrote:
| > 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.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Why is this truth so painful for many to hear?
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I didn't realize we were talking about January 6th.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think extent and severity are relative to the
| expectations of the individual. EG What do you think is
| extensive and severe?
|
| There are many course of Metro cities where businesses
| are still damaged and boarded up 3 years later.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Allenrb above is disputing you.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| 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.
| allenrb wrote:
| 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.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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)
| [deleted]
| nancyhn wrote:
| 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.
| helen___keller wrote:
| 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.
| helen___keller wrote:
| 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.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Vancouver?
| smeagull wrote:
| Cities are too expensive. Once baristas and cleaners can't
| afford to eat, live and travel in one things start to get
| bad.
|
| I'd rather work for less money in a cheaper neighbourhood.
| jeffwask wrote:
| For me the convenience and access of city life makes it a
| better cheaper choice.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Exactly why I've lived in Texas on two different occasions.
|
| I can reliably find decent work here, without paying _too
| much_ to get by. We 're slowly approaching the limit, though
|
| Mostly paranoia at this stage. Last time I moved away I got
| laid off... meaning I moved back
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| 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.
| eulers_secret wrote:
| > 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?
| geodel wrote:
| You make some great points. Good times in tech has given
| some false sense of security.
| FpUser wrote:
| 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.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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.
| hparadiz wrote:
| 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.
| zb1plus wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _time to unionize the tech sector_
|
| 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.
| neogodless wrote:
| What industry are you in?
|
| 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.
| mech422 wrote:
| I've been remote for 20 years now... It just gets easier
| every year. I see no reason to back now...
| elforce002 wrote:
| 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.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| I'm now entering my eighth year of working full-time
| remote since 2008. Had a big gap between 2013 and COVID,
| but I don't see myself ever going back.
|
| South Carolina is too choice of a place to live.
| elforce002 wrote:
| Enjoy it man. Less stress and no commute is the way to
| go. Small city life FTW!.
| loganfrederick wrote:
| 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.
| brailsafe wrote:
| But I'm not sure anywhere was gutted to see them go. Some
| people hate being around others, many love denser
| communities.
| [deleted]
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| 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.
| wombatpm wrote:
| 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!
| FpUser wrote:
| Remote for 20+ years. I am in Canada
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| folkrav wrote:
| 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.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| 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.
| angmarsbane wrote:
| Also, when both spouses have to work to get by you have to
| live where there are job opportunities for both.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| 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.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Twenty-five years ago a recruiter asked my wife how far she
| was willing to move.
|
| "Why would I move? This is Boston: if there are high-tech
| jobs at all there will be something here."
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| antisthenes wrote:
| 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.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I guess I'm privileged but I wouldn't move more than 50
| miles for any amount of $.
| usrusr wrote:
| 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.
| zen_1 wrote:
| Not even $20M a year? You could just work for one year
| and be set for life basically anywhere you want to live.
| [deleted]
| zdragnar wrote:
| If someone is offering $20m a year, I can safely assume
| the job is bogus and pass.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| 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.
|
| That's not really worth it for me.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| mv4 wrote:
| 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).
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| anon223345 wrote:
| A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
|
| Not 1.2 or 1.4 birds in the bush
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| 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.
| bertday wrote:
| 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.
| ericmay wrote:
| Doesn't that demonstrate the OP's point?
|
| 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.
| whiddershins wrote:
| I intellectually believe that could be true but NYC
| anecdotally seems more crowded and is definitely more
| expensive than ever before.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I believe that was only educated workers. Metropolis's are
| still growing from uneducated workers.
| abruzzi wrote:
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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)
| brewdad wrote:
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| shagie wrote:
| This is from last year: Cities Lost Population in 2021,
| Leading to the Slowest Year of Growth in U.S. History htt
| ps://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/us/census-2021-population
| ...
|
| > 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.
| justinzollars wrote:
| > There's a fundamental disconnect between how hard it is to
| relocate and how easy it is to lose your job.
|
| Absolutely. I would never move for a job.
| wwweston wrote:
| > getting grief from your mortgage lender or insurer, paying
| early termination fees on rent and services
|
| A lot could be included in this, but let's make some specifics
| explicit: if you locked in housing costs in 2020, it's entirely
| credible that a move could involve a 50-100% increase on that
| front right now.
|
| Remote work can have pros/cons but it's more or less a
| declaration of independence for both employees _and_ employers
| from having to care about market-specific housing costs in
| general.
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| Americans don't realize how bad they have it.
|
| America is only a Good Place(tm) for the very rich while its
| suffering expands out in a Power law distribution. No other
| "rich" country abuses homeless, the disabled, the almost
| homeless, and the working poor with as much unequal treatment
| as much except so-called "third-world" countries. The middle
| class of America is small, privileged, and unaware of the
| suffering and exploitation of ~100 M Americans below it and of
| its enablement of the "1%" to continue the status quo.
| ok_dad wrote:
| > The middle class of America is small, privileged, and
| unaware of the suffering and exploitation of ~100 M Americans
| below it and of its enablement of the "1%" to continue the
| status quo.
|
| I would defend those in the middle class by saying that they
| are more comfortable than the poor in America, but have about
| the same amount (zero) of political power. The middle class
| is still a worker class, and as such is still subject to the
| whims of the wealthy capital owners.
|
| I don't think I am in the middle class, as I don't even own a
| home, but I do make a good living and I would say I am more
| well-off than many people in the town I currently live in. I
| know about what's going on in America, and it pisses me off,
| and if I had the power to change a tiny bit of it I would,
| but I don't.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Do you have any statistics to back up anything you're saying,
| or is everything "just so"? How precisely are we "abusing the
| disabled"? Are there metrics for this? How does it compare to
| other countries? Can you give examples of what you're even
| talking about? Or how about even just... be specific?
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Americans don't realize how bad they have it.
|
| I don't know about that. At the very least, a large
| percentage of Americans know how bad they have it.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Ya, some employers simply don't understand this. The last two
| times I've moved, the total costs were upwards of $50k, and
| that doesn't include the $50k I lost on the first house (due to
| the 2008 financial crisis).
|
| My last boss offered me a $30k/yr raise to move to a different
| country for a small promotion with no real path forward beyond
| that. I said, "no way... it would take 6 years (after income
| taxes) for me to pay for that move with the increase in salary,
| and the new country's higher income taxes."
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| To me a missing part of the puzzle/article is simply this. What
| percent of people have moved in the past 3 years? People aren't
| pure homoeconomicus on just the CoL and their potential salary.
| There's a human part of not wanting to move because they have
| done so recently. It's all the social/emotional toil that others
| have mentioned.
|
| 1. Friends
|
| 2. Learning a new city, where is the good pizza, where is the
| gym, etc for your context
|
| 3. Shifting to local cultural norms, like tailgating (both on the
| highway and at footbal) is just a way of life in Austin, TX.
|
| 4. the nature of nesting, converting a building/house into
| "home", spending weeks or months adjusting to the new
| surroundings for sleep[1]
|
| 5. changing your mailing address on dozens of accounts, drivers
| license, insurance etc.
|
| 6. Finding a new doctor/accountant (and the multistate
| complexity)
|
| It's actually a wonder we're as mobile as we are when you
| enumerate the barriers.
|
| What did I miss?
|
| [1]: https://www.ergoflex.co.uk/blog/category/sleep-
| research/how-... this was the best article i could find quickly,
| but I seem to recall the effect actually lasts months. Granted
| this happens when you move locally too.
| ericmay wrote:
| Economists would tell you that this is a bad thing. The most
| productive workers should move to where they can produce the most
| (as represented by wages) and they may be right!
|
| But the problem here is that such transience comes at the expense
| of social networks and democracy.
|
| With the continued rise of remote work, we get to have our cake
| and eat it too. You can put down roots and build a local
| community, but now you can also command wages reflecting your
| productivity without having to relocate.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > With the continued rise of remote work, we get to have our
| cake and eat it too
|
| Not necessarily as much as you might think. If they're opening
| the way to remote work, then you're competing with all the
| remote workers around, many of whom don't need as high a salary
| now their housing costs have drastically reduced.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _competing with all the remote workers around, many of whom
| don 't need as high a salary now their housing costs have
| drastically reduced._
|
| That's not a bad thing. We've been playing Paris and sucking
| economic activity to a few cities for far too long, IMHO,
| which has subsidized some very unhealthy city behavior (e.g.
| SF).
|
| In the future, the city winners of pre-WFH regime are going
| to face serious budgetary pressure as central business
| districts atrophy.
|
| They're going to need to make up that tax base (read: keep
| the lights on) somewhere, and it's inevitably going to shift
| from business to homeowner/citizen. Remaining service
| businesses will replace some of that, but you'll be patching
| a big hole from corporate HQs.
|
| It'll be a question of whether or not people are willing to
| put up with substantially higher taxes in exchange for urban
| living.
|
| Interesting times for cities with cash cow CBDs.
|
| And to the benefit of cities with good quality of life that
| were missing employment options (e.g. the 35deg-40deg
| weather-belt in the US).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Totally agree. It will be interesting.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| Now just replace cities with the USA and same logic
| applies. I think the loser is going to be the entire
| American worker pool (especially the ordinary ones, 10x
| developers will be fine).
| ericmay wrote:
| > It'll be a question of whether or not people are willing
| to put up with substantially higher taxes in exchange for
| urban living.
|
| This is pretty interesting. I think they will because they
| do today so long as the right amenities are provided and
| there is density. Personally we relocated and to a downtown
| neighborhood and 1.5x'd our taxes but now we have a
| fantastic park and other great amenities. The schools suck
| but maybe we could just do a statewide voucher where you
| aren't tied to where you live for where you send your kids
| to school or something. I expect more private schools to
| emerge as well. [1]
|
| There is a lot of economic waste in CBD in many American
| cities. In Columbus we have acres of surface parking lots
| in the downtown area. Converting those to housing, small
| businesses, and leaner offices will probably not 1-1
| replace giant skyscraper corporate HQs (though I'm a little
| naive to the tax arrangements there) but they'll help.
|
| One way to think about the CBD in, let's say Columbus is
| that the surface parking lots are an extractive economic
| feature that are only sustainable to the city's tax base so
| long as they're filled with workers going downtown. Once
| those lots aren't functioning properly you have all this
| space... and you need tax revenue... so something will have
| to give and I don't think it's the city.
|
| I think a better question to ask is are people going to be
| able to afford higher taxes from living in the suburbs
| without any amenities. Sidewalks and trams and municipal
| water scale much better with density than having all that
| stuff spread out everywhere. Right now we can "afford" them
| because of cheap oil and such but that won't last.
|
| [1] Please note that I strongly support every child getting
| the best education possible. I don't know what the solution
| is exactly, but I do know that city schools at least where
| I live have been bad and continue to be bad and at some
| point we're just wasting money and we need a better
| solution.
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm one of those remote workers who live in a middle of
| nowhere place, remote work is bring my salary up as I can
| compete with all those west coast workers.
| philipov wrote:
| Not having to move is itself a good that the markets should
| optimize for. Productivity isn't an end, it is a means. But
| having stability in your life _is_ an end.
| gtop3 wrote:
| Productivity is an end for some organizations/people.
| Personal stability is an end for some people.
|
| My main goals at work are being engaged, working with smart
| people, tackling problems with impacts I care about, and
| developing deep expertise. I think the markets are fairly
| well established for skilled labor to dictate what they want
| from work and choose career paths and companies that suit
| them. I know SWEs that have worked at the same company for
| 20+ years. I know SWEs that only accept 6 month work
| contracts or shorter. I know SWEs that have switched
| continents several times in their career, and SWEs that have
| never lived outside of their birthtown (expect for
| University).
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| >social networks and democracy
|
| Things that aren't built into economics models
| HPsquared wrote:
| Just another indicator that labour is becoming a seller's market.
| tclancy wrote:
| For people who can pick and choose.
| balderdash wrote:
| You can't take your low mortgage rate with you... so if you have
| a 300k 30yr fixed rate mortgage @2.5% now that mortgages are 6%
| that represents a ~50% not gain for you, so you assuming you
| could buy the same house in the new location for the same price,
| you'd still need to be paid ~$150k to move! Don't think many
| people are getting sign on bonuses of ~1/2 thawing outstanding
| mortgage balance...
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Companies can entice people to move by including an unconditional
| notice period for termination in their job offer letters.
|
| If you're essentially guaranteed a couple months notice (which
| could be a non-working period with full pay), that would easily
| take you until the end of the kids' semester or whatever.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Lots of other good comments on this thread, but the Bloomberg
| title almost makes me want to join the r/antiwork crowd.
|
| The housing market is simply insane right now. How is someone
| with a 3% mortgage going to be willing to move if it means their
| monthly payment will double for about the same amount of house?
| This is a complete logical, rational decision. But the framing in
| the title "Americans have never been so _unwilling_ ... " plays
| right into the "nobody wants to work anymore" BS. The current
| economic conditions have just made it extremely stupid to
| relocate for a job in most situations.
| hnrodey wrote:
| Wouldn't it be nice if mortgages could be tied to the borrower
| instead of the property? Imagine that as a borrower, you could
| keep your existing mortgage terms when moving to new houses
| (assuming similar property values, etc.) and if you needed to
| buy a more expensive home then you'd have to get an additional
| loan to cover the difference or pay cash, etc.
| lisplist wrote:
| Lol this would make home price inflation even worse. Great if
| you have a mortgage, terrible for FTHB. Kinda like Prop 13 in
| California.
| eduction wrote:
| You could accomplish this in a roundabout way outside the
| mortgage system:
|
| -You rent out your home and retain and continue to service
| your low interest rate mortgage.
|
| -You relocate to new city and rent from someone else with a
| low interest rate mortgage (and thus, presumably, attractive
| rental terms).
|
| I predict this will become an increasingly common solution
| (for the subset of homeowners who need to/want to relocate)
| and that some sort of new middleman/platform will emerge to
| serve this market (think longer term residential leases,
| better vetting of renters, etc)
| speby wrote:
| This can 'sort of' be done thru loan assumption. But it is a
| provision that only some loans have. And it isn't tied to the
| borrower but to the asset. Example would be you were selling
| your house and a buyer wanted to 'assume' your mortgage. They
| could actually do that where they take over the remaining
| principal, a loan assumption provision would allow that.
| Granted, the buyer would still need to come up with the cash
| for the rest of the price of the home (selling price -
| remaining loan balance) and to do that, the buyer would
| either need to bring cash to the table or get a 2nd loan to
| make up for that difference.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| You can do this in UK, it's called Porting a mortgage.
|
| Typical interest rate fixes are much shorter in the UK though
| (2, 5, 3, 10 year fixes are the most common)
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| Our approach sounds much more sane than the US. Who wants
| to fix at todays rate for 30 years with no ability to the
| port the terms to a new property?
| balderdash wrote:
| Except that fixed term mortgages have the option to
| prepay - so people in the US signing 30yr fixed mortgages
| are locking in a fixed ceiling for the duration of their
| mortgage, and if mortgage rates come down in a couple of
| years, they just refinance the whole thing, but they pay
| a spread over an ARM for this option. For some people
| it's more prudent to pay a few hundred extra basis points
| over the next several years, than risk their mortgage
| resetting at a higher rate, and having the option of
| refinancing at a lower rate...they're purchasing
| insurance...
| [deleted]
| aidenn0 wrote:
| There's no prepay penalty in the US. I got a fixed rate
| at 5% on my current house and currently pay 3% due to
| having taken out new loans to pay off the old one (a.k.a
| refinancing).
|
| A 30 year rate fix with no prepay penalty is _incredibly_
| borrower friendly because you can (nearly) always take
| advantage of lower interest rates, but don 't have to
| worry about your rate ever going up.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| Nah, it's better in the US. 30 year fixed being the norm
| means that you don't need to worry about rate hikes. The
| advantage of shorter fixed rate periods are usually lower
| rates, but 30 years are already low. The peace of mind is
| valuable.
| snordgren wrote:
| Those 30 year mortgages also makes the economy less
| sensitive to interest rate raises, allowing you to run a
| higher interest rate than a comparable country where
| 30-year mortgages is not the norm. This makes the dollar
| stronger.
| bgirard wrote:
| I was told that my Canadian mortgage could be 'ported' like
| this, although I haven't had to look into it. From my
| experience Canadian mortgages have less fees up front at
| closing compared to US mortgages but typically they sway you
| towards a locked 3 to 5 year term where you might face
| penalties for breaking the mortgage. The 'port' options can
| be used in this situation to avoid the fees.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Aren't long term fixed interest mortgages basically unheard
| of in Canada though? Having portability with your mortgage
| would only really benefit people with fixed interest rates
| lower than the prevailing interest rate.
| bgirard wrote:
| Yes, but when you're signing a mortgage with potential
| prepayment penalties and you're afraid that you might not
| live there for say 5 years, your lender will use the
| 'port' option to reassure you. I suspect that's the main
| feature. Not to lock-in a 30-year rate and have it follow
| you.
| dehrmann wrote:
| This was the tradeoff when you bought your house in 2021.
| Highest prices ever, lowest interest rates ever. Buy and you're
| locked-in for at least 5 years.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Houses are still pretty expensive, even with interest rates
| where they are.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Or bought a long time ago but kept re-financing the mortgage
| over and over.
|
| You have to be a moron to move right now unless you have to.
| Even a sideways move to an equivalent value house might be
| $50k of extra interest per year out the door. $50k you're
| putting into high yield investments right now. Finishing the
| mortgage in < 10 years versus starting over with a new 30
| year mortgage at double the interest rate. Working 5 or 10
| extra years before retiring just so you can move into that
| new house that you bought when prices were historically high.
|
| Realtors are freaking out locally. Their game has changed
| drastically.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| Bought and refi'd on the way down is what many people did.
| I was paying extra but at 2%, what's the point and why
| would I ever move unless I had to?
|
| 2014 - 5%/30y
|
| 2015 - 3.75%/30y
|
| 2016 - 2.75%/15y
|
| 2021 - 2%/10y
| ptero wrote:
| > You have to be a moron to move right now unless you have
| to.
|
| Not necessarily. The current state of high rates _and_ high
| valuations (due to few sellers) is very unusual. It is so
| skewed that, for example, I could sell my condo and use
| proceeds to pay off my remaining mortgage and buy, for
| cash, a large house in excellent condition in a smaller
| town. Someone close to retirement might do that and retire
| today instead of working another 5-10 years. My 2c.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| the market is still hot enough here to cover my 2021 price.
| but all the other hassles noted would make a move to anywhere
| but my dream regions for greater pay a no go.
| secretsatan wrote:
| Reading some comments, the headline should be, "Companies have
| never been so unwilling to offer competitive wages"
| robertlagrant wrote:
| How can this be, if they're all doing it?
| [deleted]
| jollyllama wrote:
| Even as remote work fades into the past and management wins out,
| this will still be true. People will leave money and advancement
| on the table in favor of stability and "community" of a kind. For
| better or worse, in a time of social upheaval, people will be
| correctly afraid to go where they are perceived as outsiders and
| will try to stay where they feel they belong.
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| Forever thankful for remote work. Moving my entire family is
| simply not an option for me.
|
| School. My affordable cost of living. Friends. Family.
| Familiarity. Churches I enjoy. Sports.
|
| All of the little bits that make life enjoyable to me would
| effectively be reset, and the thought of having to do that sounds
| like a massive barrier to entry to any potential job.
| elforce002 wrote:
| Wow. Hold on to that and enjoy it my man. You have the
| "american dream" right there. God bless you and your family.
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| Thank you, I try to be thankful for it everyday
| deegles wrote:
| I believe that hybrid and remote work is going to lead to _more_
| expensive /dense cities, not less. Remote workers will mostly
| stay in place or snatch up 2+ br places (for their home office)
| and hybrid offices could rotate employees to up usage (e.g. hot
| desks/shifts/etc).
| ResearchCode wrote:
| Employers need to increase the sign-on bonus. Relocating for at-
| will employment is very risky.
| alecnotthompson wrote:
| "Americans inching closer to realizing that work isn't life."
| pb7 wrote:
| Don't do this here.
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| Is anyone ever going to write an article about this wave of anti
| worker clickbait articles coming out of Bloomberg and Forbes et
| al?
|
| It wouldn't even take more than a few seconds reading to look up
| the massive risks you take relocating for mostly unstable work
| that are at best only partially compensated by relocation
| packages.Especially when for many people they'll be launching
| themselves into a very unfavourable housing market with no risk
| premium being paid. And yet they put out this terrible biased
| punditry under a credible looking masthead.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's because housing costs have exploded in the last 2 years.
|
| That's it. It's not because of low pay, or noncompetitive
| benefits, or the strain of moving. All those things are
| relatively constant.
|
| It's because tons of people either have a 2% mortgage that they
| will death grip to maturity, are in a rent controlled apartment
| (many places have ~5% raise caps that fall way short of the
| 20-50% rent increases seen), or just have a kind landlord that
| has kept rent stable.
|
| Housing is _severely_ fucked right now, and we 're gonna be stuck
| like this until either more homes are built or people lose their
| jobs (forcing relocation to another house/rental).
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Yes, and not just housing costs... all costs. The general cost
| of living has gone way up everywhere (some places more than
| others of course).
| davidw wrote:
| Housing was messed up even without the mortgage thing. This
| trend has been clear for a few years:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/briefing/cities-yimby-exo...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Totally agree. The housing market is simply in a state of
| stasis right now. Sellers are loath to sell at a loss, and
| buyers can't afford these prices because interest rates have
| gone up so much.
|
| While I'm sympathetic to many of the other arguments that
| "moving is hard while firing you is easy", that dynamic has
| existed for at least 25 years. The total insanity of the
| current housing market is the thing that is relatively new.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Most homeowners would make a profit, but any of them who have
| bought or refinanced a house in the past few years would be
| idiots to sell now because of the interest rates.
| jeffwask wrote:
| I have a death grip on my 3% mortgage and thank the stars I got
| in just before things went more to shit.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| In 2015, I bought a 2500 sqft home in a great school district
| on 1.5 acres. Zillow says it's now worth $330k, and would
| need a mortgage of roughly $2800/mo. Six doors down, a
| neighbor is _renting_ for $2100 /mo.
|
| I'm at 2.8%, paying $1100/mo on a 15-year $130k mortgage.
|
| I got lucky. I feel bad for my friends and relatives who did
| not join the market at the right time.
| jeffwask wrote:
| I got burned on my first house and ended up short selling
| in 13-14 after the first collapse when I moved. I was gun
| shy about buying when I moved to Texas and missed the
| really cheap houses. My initial plan was buying in 2022 but
| I am so glad my wife pushed us to go for it in 2021 or I
| would be paying at least a grand a month more in interest
| or be in a less ideal home.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I think my first mortgage in the mid 1990s was around 7%. I
| remember double-digit rates in the late 70s/early 80s though
| I was too young to really care about it then. Home prices
| didn't inflate so crazily then either.
|
| Rates are still low, historically. But as they are moving up
| from very low, the increases are huge, percentage-wise. Most
| of the reason home prices have inflated so much in the last
| decade or two is that borrowing has been very cheap.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tracking-mortgage-
| rates-1970s...
|
| If rates return to their historical averages, we may see home
| prices deflating or at least not increasing for a while.
| dh2022 wrote:
| For home prices to deflate people would have to sell at
| lower prices - in some cases below their home equity. In
| these cases sellers would have to basically pay the bank
| the difference. Given how affordable 3% rates are, I think
| people would not sell.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > In these cases sellers would have to basically pay the
| bank the difference
|
| Or they can default. Mortgages in the US are typically
| limited recourse, not full recourse. Of course that makes
| you a pariah to lenders for the next several years...
| bequanna wrote:
| What you're referring to is called a "short sale" and
| they are not uncommon during recessionary periods.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| ya, i only want to move to places where housing doesn't make
| sense financially. anecdotal but still
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| Yep. If I were to move to a comparably-priced house with an
| otherwise comparable mortgage at today's rates, my costs would
| go up $1650/month. That's 20 grand a year. So before a company
| could even begin to entice me with a raise, they need to
| increase my salary by about $30k (accounting for taxes) for me
| to feel like I'm breaking even.
| dh2022 wrote:
| And that assumes comparably-priced house are of the same
| quality (neighborhood, size, etc...)
| 88913527 wrote:
| Practically, for your average well-to-do white collar worker,
| the additional $20k in interest payments might equate to 10%
| of gross income. The pain of the additional expense is
| certainly non-zero, but it isn't necessarily prohibitive.
| Especially if that $20k is going into savings or investments
| anyways, it's not coming at the cost of foregoing some other
| current consumption. Many people could afford it, but have
| some hesitation.
|
| The declining transaction volume is more likely due to
| forward-looking expectations on prices. People can afford it,
| they're simply opting out of eating the additional costs.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| There's no way I'm moving to Seattle, SF, or NYC for a job. It's
| not happening, and it's just not negotiable.
|
| I understand that in-person communication has its benefits, but
| the proposition is to (a) move myself and my immediate family
| across the country, (b) pay exorbitant costs for living, (c) be
| disconnected from the rest of my family, and (d) have no
| guarantee that I'm not going to get randomly laid off.
|
| You're telling me all of that is worth it because you don't like
| Zoom? Not be crass, but honestly, fuck off.
| benzofuran wrote:
| It's getting much tougher to pull this off - I recently had an
| offer for a cherry government job but it was in southern
| California. The salary, while competitive for most locations,
| would've required me to be independently wealthy to live within
| an hour of the office in order to buy even a modest home.
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| Amazon corporate just went to 100% in-office. People who were
| previously remote now have to commute or would be fired. Even if
| there job has nothing to do with being in an office and their
| team is elsewhere in the world. My neighbor is one such employee
| where it wastes gas and time getting them to an office they don't
| have a business reason to be in except fulfill butt-in-seat
| mentality of the overlords.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Some believe we're seeing a broader return to the local away from
| an atomizing radical individualism. The causes for this shift are
| likely many, not least of all that human nature is social and
| that life is always located, but two circumstantial causes that
| come to mind are the shift to remote work that occurred during
| the pandemic which gave people the opportunity to break out of
| old routines and experience the shift to local, and the steady
| decrease in trust of disembodied, remote, and effectively
| faceless media and information brokers (add to this the deepfakes
| that will make video and audio evidence increasingly dubious) who
| are rapidly losing their control of "the narrative". (The owl of
| Minerva flies only at dusk.)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Hegel did not need to be quoted here my friend. Let him rest.
| Mockapapella wrote:
| Working from home was the best quality of life upgrade I've
| gotten in the last couple of years, and it would take something
| truly over the top exciting and lucrative to get me to pick up my
| life and move it somewhere else for the primary benefit of a
| company.
| danjoredd wrote:
| Why would I want to relocate for a job when I can work remote and
| stay close to my friends?
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| A company wanted me to move to another country & the employment
| contract contained a two month probationary period.
| vdm wrote:
| https://archive.is/Ogbql
| shipscode wrote:
| With the flexibility of remote work it's hard to feel like
| anybody but chumps still work in person, let alone uproot their
| whole lives for an opportunity that can be swiped at a moment's
| notice.
|
| The only reason I would personally relocate would be greater
| freedom, and relocating for a job is antithetical to that notion.
| mydriasis wrote:
| Had an offer for a remote job... if and only if I were to
| relocate to California ( several thousand miles away from where I
| am now ) for _two months_ for "onsite training" before going
| fully remote.
|
| With a pay cut.
|
| And worse incentives than where I was.
|
| ?????
|
| They were downright _flabbergasted_ when I said no. As if it
| weren't going to be a massive disruption to my entire life and
| way of being.
| rc_mob wrote:
| I don't believe you bloomberg. I think you are lying.
| epc wrote:
| No one could foresee treating labor as a disposable commodity
| item would have negative consequences. Who knew?
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| The phrase Human Resources always sounds so 20th Century to me.
| I_Lorem wrote:
| [flagged]
| TexanFeller wrote:
| It's an awful term in so many ways. Resources are things that
| we exhaust, pump dry, clear cut, and eventually discard. I've
| always though human resources always seemed awkwardly close
| in tone to terms like human cattle.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > Resources are things that we exhaust, pump dry, clear
| cut, and eventually discard.
|
| sounds pretty accurate to me.
| vlan0 wrote:
| >Resources are things that we exhaust, pump dry, clear cut,
| and eventually discard.
|
| This is how humans treat nature without mindfulness. I
| suppose it should not be a surprise when we treat each
| other as we do nature. As humans are also part of nature.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Unwilling to relocate to where? There's a bunch of states sane
| people don't want to go anywhere near right now.
| elforce002 wrote:
| Which ones? Tbh, I could name 5 cities right off the top of my
| head I wouldn't even commute to work yet alone raise children.
| flashgordon wrote:
| Hmm. I was slightly shocked. Or may be I am the spoilt and
| entitled one. Is it normal to demand that someone move for their
| job or be offended if they refuse? I mean yes it may be a great
| opportunity and all but moving is a huge huge disruption in ones
| life and if this economic period has shown there was never any
| loyalty (or even good faith) by the company and now the thin veil
| is also off.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Could political polarization impact this? There are a lot of
| states or areas I wouldn't consider relocating to.
| PerilousD wrote:
| Dumb question. If an employer wants you to move then (a) Pay
| relocation costs. (b) Offer a REAL employment contract for a
| specified period. Employees may need an agent (just like pro
| sports) and pay a percentage but if you get cut then you know
| what your payout will be. I think item B is where employers will
| balk and blame the potential employee as "difficult"
| seadan83 wrote:
| Most relocation packages are pro-rated over one or two years
| even, or are required to be payed back in full if there is a
| separation within that period (willful or not by either party).
|
| My point is even with relocation assistance, the deal is still
| not great (could draw a very strained parallel to indentured
| servitude). Which is to say, not super appealing.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Sure not all deals are good and that's why you shouldn't
| agree to all deals. I personally wouldn't even call it a
| relocation package, if I could be fired (without cause at
| least) and then forced to repay it afterwards. I'm glad (or
| at least lucky) that I don't need to consider such a
| ridiculous arrangement.
| seadan83 wrote:
| I think we're all in general agreement in this thread. If a
| company gives a bad deal for relocation, it's no surprise
| it is unattractive. I was pointing out that even relocation
| assistance is often part of that bad deal.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Any reasonable contract (not the default one, but one you
| push back to get) will include a clause that all repayable
| benefits are only if you quit, not if they terminate
| employment. (Some will include terminate with cause) .
|
| I got a signing bonus, and if they lay me off then they lose
| their signing bonus. Yes i negotiated that into my contract.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| For whatever the reason, this is not a good sign for the broader
| economy. The 2007/2008 recovery was stifled because so many owned
| and could not or would not relocate to areas where there were
| jobs and economic growth.
|
| Ownership is a commitment. One that isn't undone without thought,
| time and effort. It looks great on paper when times are good /
| great. But ownership adds friction when more fluidity is needed.
|
| Put another way, companies that have figured out or are figuring
| out WFH / remote are going to fare better than those insisting on
| a return to office.
| gr1zzlybe4r wrote:
| Honestly if you're moving just for a job, you're a sucker.
|
| You need to be moving so that you can be in a city you want to be
| in, you get offered at least 50% more money in nominal terms
| probably 20% in real terms, or you're making a crazy career jump.
|
| The employer <-> employee relationship is just way too skewed in
| favor of the employer.
|
| They will cut you loose immediately if situations change. There's
| no reason for workers to be loyal to employers as a result. So
| why move for one?
| wnolens wrote:
| Yup. I'm willing to move for love, family, friends, exciting
| city etc. But job? Unless you're significantly upgrading my
| economic class. But actually I did that already when I was 20
| and not sure it was really worth it.
| NickC25 wrote:
| I once worked in a company that when I joined, was bringing in
| new recruits from seemingly everywhere - LA, Minneapolis,
| Chicago, Philly, Boston, and Phoenix, to name a few. There was
| usually some window where said new recruit was given a hotel room
| for a few weeks but sort of expected to move locally after that
| window was up.
|
| Except, the company's employee churn was crazy, and I knew a few
| people who got fired shortly after the relocation. It just seems
| crazy to me that there are no protections for workers like that -
| you force them to move only to fire them less than 3 months after
| they upend their entire lives to satisfy a company. Loyalty is a
| 2-way street now, employers need to realize that.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Seems like a good moment to ask for a relocation bonus if moving
| is required.
| itsautomatisch wrote:
| As someone who would actually relocate, I've found it very hard
| to find companies that would offer relocation reimbursement since
| they either want someone who is already local or the job is
| remote but with an optional office available and therefore not a
| requirement. I personally prefer having an office space and would
| like to have the option of going but it is becoming increasingly
| harder to apply out of state to roles with a hybrid/on-site
| presence.
| mathattack wrote:
| The economics moving is very different when your current mortgage
| rate is half what a new one would be.
| brailsafe wrote:
| This most recent layoff is so far turning out to be the easiest
| to mentally grieve, because I went in not trusting I'd still have
| a job in short time, and shockingly it turned out exactly as I
| expected, despite my effort to the contrary. I'm so detached from
| the idea of job security it's literally laughable, and the market
| is so bad I just don't even feel like wasting my time trying to
| get anything.
|
| Throughout the first few months though, it was all "move to X"
| this, and "we'll sponsor you and your spouse" that. I didn't
| trust it, because I've been through the meat grinder before. But
| almost a year in I decided to visit the town where their office
| was overseas and start a very arms length effort to feel it out.
| It was interesting to see how immediately upon arrival back,
| tensions soured between my pathetically toxic manager and I, then
| after a bad first quarter I was gone.
|
| Sad, because my lady was excited about the prospect of moving,
| but I was less trusting and more cautious, thankfully. RIP that
| job. I won't move anywhere for a company unless the conditions of
| the contract are insanely favourable and/or I'm extremely
| desperate.
|
| That said, if you're looking for someone in Vancouver;)
| anovikov wrote:
| Maybe it's because overall level of focus on career has
| diminished? People aren't achievers now as much as they used to
| be, most live relaxed lifestyles. No one is gonna rip their ass
| for a small salary increase, and a big increase is unlikely
| because advances in HR made market rather flat, everyone has a
| more or less deterministic value.
|
| It's a good thing. Work is not everything. I actually never knew
| a person who moved because of work - yes sometimes they looked
| for work in a new place because they wanted to move to that
| particular place - because of their partner, climate,
| politics/security, just to fulfil their dream - but the whole
| thing of "being offered a good job 2000 miles away so have move
| there" is entirely foreign to me. Never knew a single person who
| did that. Just because why?
| tatrajim wrote:
| >Work is not everything. I actually never knew a person who
| moved because of work<
|
| Academics are one exception. I have moved five times over my
| career, including from coast to coast and continent to
| continent to have a livelihood in my field. Work can still be
| very rewarding.
| anovikov wrote:
| Oh true! Once you reminded me, i realised that i knew two
| people who moved simply because they got academic positions
| that didn't exist elsewhere. Scientists need to be around
| their peers, and stuff in most fields happens only in a few
| places so they got to move. They truly are an exception.
| krisroadruck wrote:
| I made the mistake of moving for a role back in 2018. Money was
| super good but it was to a location I wouldn't want to be if the
| role wasn't there. Literally 45 days after we completed the move
| they decided to eliminate the role entirely. Between the move out
| and the move back the cost was something like $25K and they
| didn't provide anything to offset it. Never again.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Yep, I've moved several times for jobs. I'm sick of of it. It's
| tedious, it's expensive and the job is never worth it.
|
| Sadly the only interviews I can get nowadays are non local.
| ghaff wrote:
| It makes sense if it's the case. There's been more centralization
| around major urban areas and there's generally more acceptance of
| distributed teams whether or not employees are actually sitting
| in a home office or not. More households are two income. Put
| those all together and they both increase the friction of
| relocating and decreasing the imperative to do so in order to
| take a new job.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Ogbql
| I_Lorem wrote:
| Workers are not a liquid, they will not easily flow to where they
| are needed. There are many reasons for people to not want to
| move: losing touch with family and/or friends, dealing with
| finding new schools (if you have kids), the logistics and cost of
| moving all of your things, selling your home, finding a new home,
| is the cost of living difference favorable, the logistics of
| finding new doctor(s), the list goes on and in the end, you might
| be let go before the moving truck even arrives. This is why we
| should have national health care, it will ease some of the
| friction in workers' ability to move freely. But then again,
| companies want workers to be dependent on that job they currently
| have.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...we should have national health care...
|
| You are 100% correct! In fact, i will extend that to state that
| the U.S. should have a better social safety net which would
| include health care but other resources as well. I know in some
| circles social safety net is a bad word, but I imagine many
| workers would more readily move around if they had something to
| fall back on.
| christophilus wrote:
| I'm not sure folks were super willing to relocate in the early
| days of the US. Place and family mattered a lot back then. My
| guess is the "never" in the headline really means "not at any
| point in the past 100 years or so".
|
| To me, it's not necessarily a bad thing if more folks are staying
| put, living near long-established family and social networks,
| caring a bit less about careers and a bit more about life.
| scythe wrote:
| My great-great grandfather moved to Wisconsin _from Scotland_
| back in the "early days" of the US. Nobody in my family has
| moved as far since, save the Mennonite branch who fled Germany.
| seadan83 wrote:
| I think the situation may have been far more varied than a
| nostalgic: "Place and family mattered a lot back then"
|
| I suspect that place and family has generally always important.
|
| Yet, early US it took weeks/months for communication to occur
| over long distance.
|
| Also, let's not forget westward expansion, a thing that lasted
| even into more recent times. It was quite common for adult
| children to move west to homestead. There's also immigration to
| consider, which is a big example of relocation, and these
| future American's and their descendants continued to migrate
| (in the early days of the US)
| fundad wrote:
| Parents in most of the country are pissed that kids have to
| move to find a good job. Parents in cities are pissed our kids
| have to move in order to afford housing.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Employment is very high right now so people are pretty
| comfortable and don't have a big need to put a lot of effort in
| finding a new job. In other words, companies really need to sell
| a new job.
|
| That combined with a housing market that is actually not great in
| terms of sky rocketing prices and increasing interest rates means
| that a lot of people would have to take financial risks moving
| and would have to risk a downgrade of their current situation.
| Especially if they already have a house. And then of the places
| with the highest needs for workers are exactly where it's most
| expensive to move to.
|
| That adds up to a lot of hassle to find a new place, a lot of
| risk and uncertainty, and financial risk for basically a new job.
| And with everybody hiring, finding a new/better job is not the
| issue.
|
| So, a lot of companies that maybe aren't so hot, that aren't in a
| particularly nice part of the world, would struggle to convince
| people to come to them.
|
| I'm not from the US but I see a lot of this as an (ex) freelancer
| in Germany where a lot of companies in the middle of nowhere end
| up with expensive, remote working freelancers based in the bigger
| cities because they can't hire locally and because freelancers
| are generally not going to relocate to middle of nowhere Germany
| for a few months; or do the horrible commute on a regular basis.
| Just not a thing. That's the price of doing business in middle of
| nowhere Germany. Move your company to where you can hire if that
| is a problem for you. Or just pay the premium. I imagine it's the
| same in a lot of more rural parts of the US where the local
| talent pool is pretty small.
| oofta-boofta wrote:
| I'd venture to say a lot of companies based in 2nd/3rd tier
| locations simply did the math of hiring freelancers vs opening
| an office in those 1st tier locations and it was cheaper just
| to pay the remote workers.
|
| It's almost as if remote work is good for the worker bees and
| good for the business, but bad for the useless middle managers
| who's only job is to make sure people are working
| performatively.
| KurtMueller wrote:
| Why would I move when it took me so long to make friends and find
| a community at my current location?
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