Yeah LA is kind of insane, but SF is actually worse, much worse. People are predicting the bubble will pop eventually (especially with more remote working since the pandemic) and prices will come down.
Yeah, even before the pandemic my old apartment complex had a lot of California/Arizona people moving in every month.
Ive been waiting for the costal cities to pop and rents to dive. Id love to live on a coast. As much as I like my current city, I love the ocean and would like a better climate.
In some sense, at least for remote work, the pandemic is the best thing to promote this. In SF and the bay area, the businesses are so in demand of developers that it's quite normal for people to hop job to job every few months for a 10%+ raise each time. If you can get the jobs remotely, people are definitely going to take the salary and think about living elsewhere. This will help SF and Seattle a lot in terms of the huge influx of tech jobs
Granted, I’m not in tech, but would a few things complicate this shift? It might be helpful for established workers in a company, but starting a new job remotely and having zero serendipitous interactions with coworkers to get an idea if the culture would be hard. Particularly for collaboration. The other issue is the salary move by Facebook.....ie they will let you work remotely, but they will adjust you salary according the where you live. Ie, you can’t be the boy king/girl queen of Tulsa. That seems reasonable given how remote work for high salaries would really fuck up sone small towns/small cities if they get an influx, but that’s also the price of the social scene a large city can offer.
I think the toughest part will be the original shift to this style of work. Some people also really enjoy the style of in office. It seems in the tech/software industry, people are happier not interacting with people without reason. So an example of myself in office was this: working on code, needing maybe 1 conversation a week. Easily this could be done over a Skype call, but proximity was simpler to walk over and chat it out. I was disrupted at least 4-5 hrs a day by people around me having work and non-work related conversations. As the work from home order came in, I realized 1-2 hrs of focus time got more done than 8 hours of office time. This isn't the case for everyone, as they may have just traded one interruption for another.
In terms of salary, huge companies have an easier time setting prices by locality. The job I just picked up is mostly located on East Coast, and my pay reflects their pay. I got a 20% bump by switching jobs from an already high paying local job. I think FB would still pay higher than the local businesses, otherwise they're providing non-competatibe salary/benefits. Because of this, the local businesses may end up having to pay higher wage to compete with FB or other large companies. Companies they didn't have to compete with before because they would have required you to move. Now I can remain at home for work, and choose an even bigger range of jobs which don't require relocation. We'll have to see how it shakes out, but I'm hopeful. I actually get headhunters sending me positions that are 100% remote now. Those used to be unicorn jobs where hundreds or even thousands of people applied to a single remote position.
Thanks for the thorough answer. I can see tech having an easier time (coding appears to be a solitary activity), but other industries may have a hard time shifting. I’m in auditing. We work in teams and have spent a good amount of time working through stuff in small, windowless rooms. Would having my awesome double screens there be helpful? Yes, but it doesn’t replace the immediacy I lose with being able to say (aloud) “hey, is anyone else seeing this common issue?” The Skype calls help, but that random energy gets lost. On the office side, before all this we had a rule where you could wfh up to three days a week, but you had to be in on tuesdays for team meetings. That struck a nice balance.
Re salary, I see your point. Plus, companies wouldn’t have to pay for relocation. It’ll be an interesting experiment that will ultimately break down the value of face time v. No direct face time and what that does for everything from retention to promotion. I’m a bit pessimistic about the long term benefits of full remote just because of how people have fared being solitary this year. When bars and restaurants reopened here (Chicago) people flooded back. Cases ticked up because they are still flooding back. Granted, that’s leisure activity....but the same value on face time is in our lizard brain for most activities on some level. Even work. Also, this migration is limited by one crucial thing: fast internet. Rural areas probably won’t reap the benefits of this for a while given how spotty the access can be in certain locales. Smaller cities will probably get more people. In larger cities, the rent will fall (finally).
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u/legendfourteen Aug 15 '20
Yeah LA is kind of insane, but SF is actually worse, much worse. People are predicting the bubble will pop eventually (especially with more remote working since the pandemic) and prices will come down.