| Ouch. This comment is cutting. The truth can be that way sometimes, no? Probably the only thing I take issue with is your second point. No matter how much companies talk about how much of a "talent shortage" there is, the mythical "overpaid engineer" in an area with high competition density is a lot rarer than they'd appear. To even get and keep a median salary job that lets you move there (and stay there), you're competing with (and often have to lose to) a lot of folks. Social participation in that world and the learning of what gets rewarded and punished during your formative years helps condition you towards going about solving problems a given way, and alters you as a person. I am sure that I would be different if I spent the early formative years of my career in SV instead of NYC. I'd be solving different problems with different people and moving up career wise through different maneuvers. So here's my question: will the pivot towards remote work diffuse or further reinforce hub centrality for current tech hubs? To be honest, I'm kind of mentally split on this one. Here's what I could imagine along both sides: For concentration: - Lacking differentiation, areas outside of tech hubs will become increasingly commodified (one giant suburb), stratified and divided into castes
- Executives will tend to cluster around hub centers, middle managers around suburbs, ICs around exurbs and further; moving up will require "moving inwards"
- Customer and capital consolidation into cities will continue
- City lifestyle will continue being a status symbol synonymous with affluence, success, clout and social standing For diffusion:
- Propped up by inflated prices out of line with their underlying assets, hubs will crash economically when people have the option to work there without living there
- Companies seeking to evade the "geography tax" will learn to work remotely to gain an edge in OpEx over competitors that don't and through lower margins gradually beat competitors that don't adapt into submission
- Natural disasters, climate change and pandemics have/will continue to spark continued interest in the "retreat from society"
- The pioneer spirit will come into vogue again, as enterprising contrarians try to rough it on the frontier once more, taking risks on developing fringe territory to capitalize off the nonlinear value they add (this, along with DoD funds/braintrust, was how SV began) I don't know. It's hard to reason about what the outcome will be at this point. Greater flexibility seems like it would lead to heterogeneity. But as always, there are nonlinear second order effects that we can't think of now that will doubtless seem obvious in retrospect. What do other folks think? |
Isn't this already the general pattern? I see that continuing, but with a very slight diminishing of the mega-hubs and a slight boost to secondary hubs (Austin, Boulder, etc).
> For diffusion: - Propped up by inflated prices out of line with their underlying assets, hubs will crash economically when people have the option to work there without living there
I think any prediction of the loss of the significance of cities is pretty far fetched. Cities have been robust to millenia of changes, including multiple past pandemics that have always disproportionately affected them vs more remote areas.
> [Companies] will learn to work remotely to gain an edge in OpEx over competitors that don't and through lower margins gradually beat competitors that don't adapt into submission
This will only happen in sectors with competition over thin margins and high OpEx as a percentage of expenditures, like running a manufacturing plant. That doesn't really reflect the kind of tech work done in tech hubs, which is CapEx and creativity heavy. Even pure software has to stay abreast of consumer and cultural trends, which are largely form in cities. A lot of software are dynamic cultural products, similar in many ways to movies, music, and TV shows. It could. however, affect things like consumer-facing tech support, but that has largely already taken place - a lot of tech support for major companies happens out of lower cost cities in the US, not the expensive tech hubs.