Movin' Out
I started thinking recently again about location. A friend of mine keeps talking about moving back to New York because there's no jobs for him here in Colorado. Another friend has just moved from Denver to Wichita, Kansas and is loving it (by the way, Josh and his wife just had a kid, so everyone give a shout out to my writing partner and his new daughter, Victoria!). And I, as I've stated in the past, am almost location independent. I live in Aurora, but what I do could really be done just about anywhere. And now that I know I wouldn't have to learn Spanish to move to Belize...
So I started wondering, if you have a job composed of "knowledge work", does it really matter where you live? The internet means you can work "alongside" people anywhere in the world. The open source movement proves that geographic distance between team members is no barrier to producing a top-notch product.
And if you don't need to live in a big city because you work there, why would anyone live there?
Don't get me wrong. I love NYC. It's one of my favorite places in the world... to visit. But even though my life is fast-paced, even though if left to my own schedule I go to sleep at 5am and wake up at 2pm, even though I can curse at cabbies and faster-than-light bike messengers with the best of them, I don't think I could ever live in New York. I'm an urban kind of guy, but ten million or so people is just too damn many.
We've seen one after another corporate exodus from major metro areas because they finally learned that they could spend less money on overhead in Boise than Boston. But what about the rest of us? When will knowledge workers start to migrate away from the big cities and into smaller towns where the rent is cheaper, the crime rate is lower and, one would think, the traffic is less maddening (though Josh will fight me on that one)?
(As a side note, there's a company out there somewhere that's figured out that when you factor in communications costs and language barriers, it's actually cheaper overall to outsource IT support to Oklahoma than India. Let's see more of that. I was born in Texas. I can understand Okie accents.)
So I started wondering, if you have a job composed of "knowledge work", does it really matter where you live? The internet means you can work "alongside" people anywhere in the world. The open source movement proves that geographic distance between team members is no barrier to producing a top-notch product.
And if you don't need to live in a big city because you work there, why would anyone live there?
Don't get me wrong. I love NYC. It's one of my favorite places in the world... to visit. But even though my life is fast-paced, even though if left to my own schedule I go to sleep at 5am and wake up at 2pm, even though I can curse at cabbies and faster-than-light bike messengers with the best of them, I don't think I could ever live in New York. I'm an urban kind of guy, but ten million or so people is just too damn many.
We've seen one after another corporate exodus from major metro areas because they finally learned that they could spend less money on overhead in Boise than Boston. But what about the rest of us? When will knowledge workers start to migrate away from the big cities and into smaller towns where the rent is cheaper, the crime rate is lower and, one would think, the traffic is less maddening (though Josh will fight me on that one)?
(As a side note, there's a company out there somewhere that's figured out that when you factor in communications costs and language barriers, it's actually cheaper overall to outsource IT support to Oklahoma than India. Let's see more of that. I was born in Texas. I can understand Okie accents.)
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home