Politicians and economists lament that certain alpha regions — SF, LA, NYC, Boston, Toronto, London, Paris — attract all the best jobs while becoming..
Politicians and economists lament that certain alpha regions — SF, LA, NYC, Boston, Toronto, London, Paris — attract all the best jobs while becoming repellently expensive, reducing economic mobility and contributing to further bifurcation between haves and have-nots. But why don’t the best jobs move elsewhere?
Of course many of them can’t. The average financier in NYC or London (until Brexit annihilates London’s banking industry, of course…) would be laughed out of the office, and not invited back, if they told their boss they wanted to henceforth work from Chiang Mai.
But this isn’t true of (much of) the software field. The average web / app developer might have such a request declined; but they would not be laughed at, or fired. The demand for good developers greatly outstrips supply, and in this era of Skype and Slack, there’s nothing about software development which requires meatspace interactions.
(This is even more true of writers, of course; I did in fact post this piece from Pohnpei. But writers don’t have anything like the leverage of software developers.)
Some people will tell you that remote teams are inherently less effective and productive than localized ones, or that “serendipitous collisions” are so important that every employee must be forced to the same physical location every day so that these collisions can be manufactured. These people are wrong, as long as the team in question is small – on the order of handfuls, dozens, or scores, rather than hundreds or thousands – and flexible.
