I just read a fascinating article in the New York Times, In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich and it reminded me how fortunate I am to live in Cincinnati. Sure, we don't have beaches here, but $300K will buy you a really nice house in most parts of town and, unless you live in the outmost 'burbs, your commute is likely under 30 minutes.
What's particularly saddening is that most of these single-digit millionaires who work 70 hours a week just to maintain their social status could have a much better quality-of-life somewhere else. Shorter commutes, housing prices a third of what they're used to paying, and more time for family and friends is all available if they just leave Silicon Valley.
I guess it's kind of like getting kids hooked on drugs to clean up. One of the first steps is to remove them from the bad influences (i.e., other kids who do drugs). However, in the case with these tech managers, it may be that they need to be removed from the other Menlo Park digerati before they realize that social pressure is really destroying their quality of life.
As critical as I was of that article and the people in it, I do understand why people don't leave -- the jobs. If you move to someplace with a lower cost of living, for a lot of the people here, you're likely leaving your career behind as well.
So if you have enough money that you'll never need to work again, are OK with a career change, or can make do with an occasional consulting gig, then you can do it, but if you want to keep on doing what you've been doing here, it's a lot harder to leave.
Read the same article and thought the same things. Somehow none of these people save the guy who went to Oregon got the idea of moving to a more "realistic" place.
I think much of this may be more of the lightning strikes twice syndrome of trying to prove their success wasn't a mistake. I think only one of the people in the article mentioned it, but I suspect it plays a pretty large part in these stories.
C'mon Fiat, you make it sound as if outside Silicon Valley we all stack haybales on the back of tractors or something! :-)
I would think telecommuting might be an option for some of these people, but I think in the end, the location, for whatever reasons is what holds these people in place. They can't imagine living in Cinci or Milwaukee or Chicago.
It's a fair point, Mike, but the number of companies willing to allow telecommuting employees not that high and the pool of local employers is also smaller. You can certainly have a tech career in any of the cities you mentioned (and more besides), but it's a fact that the range of choices is narrower.
And leaving employment issues aside, if you don't know anybody in [random city here], then picking up and moving there is a Very Big Deal. Don't underestimate that factor. Giving up years or even decades of friends, family, your entire network of doctors, dentists, plumbers, handymen, etc etc and having to rebuild the whole thing again someplace new is stressful, scary, and a lot of hard work. I ought to know, we went through it when moving to CA, and it's undoubtedly orders of magnitude harder when there are kids involved. Even if the finances make sense, if you have no friends and are spending every holiday on an airplane trying to see family, your quality of life is not necessarily higher.
In short, I'm not bashing those people for not leaving, I'm bashing them for a lack of humility about how good they have it already.