I suppose that given the $414K median house price from Zillow and subtracting that from the median house price of say Santa Clara county of $1M (same source) that leaves you $500K to buy a nice airplane to commute with :-).
Joking aside, I really do think that if you could get sufficient bandwidth into a small town at reasonable costs you really could "remote" a lot of jobs from the Bay Area.
It's not all sunshine and rainbows, jokes about the rain aside, mostly due to the fact that many, many bay area companies just don't understand why anyone would want to live anywhere but the bay.
People act like you're denigrating their entire way of life if you won't sell your house and move to the bay in return for their uninspiring below-market salary and the chance to "disrupt" something. They get especially upset when I say that the cost of living differential would need to be 50%+ of total comp, plus around $30k in moving expenses.
This doesn't seem worth it. At best you've got a company that can handle this arrangement today, but it seems to dramatically limit your options for new employment or even to survive a changes within the same org.
As a consultant who used to fly every week for three years, and hated it, I cannot believe people will voluntarily do this. My consulting travel almost killed my marriage.
People are downvoting this but honestly, its a huge consideration. I pay a huge premium to live in Boulder,CO and have often thought how awesome it'd be to move to Texas, save a ton of cash.. except yeah, if you're not content just doing "city things", it's frankly a wasteland.
The headline is clickbait. It profiles one GOOG sales executive who travels a lot. It also describes a population of people who’ve decided (or expressed interest in) moving to Bend, where they will work, or work remotely.
Summary: some people are moving to Bend, OR. Also, housing there is cheaper than Silicon Valley.
There are several of us up at E45 (Pine Mountain Lake Airport) in Groveland, CA that fly/commute to Bay Area companies. Folks in Auburn do it too. And places outside Sacramento. It's more common than you might think.
I'm a remote software dev in Bend. I've been here about a year after living in Portland for 9 years. Bend is definitely not as expensive as Portland. We can afford a lot more for our money here.
Joking aside, I really do think that if you could get sufficient bandwidth into a small town at reasonable costs you really could "remote" a lot of jobs from the Bay Area.