De-Location Package: Keep Your Career and Live Beyond the Bay Area - <AUTHOR> https://zapier.com/blog/move-away-from-sf-get-remote-job/ <comment><AUTHOR> Zapier CTO & co-founder here.

Much like Stripe's "hire a team" experiment - this is an experiment to pay people to "de-locate" from the Bay Area. Don't get us wrong, we absolutely _love_ the Bay Area (I live here) but the cost of living is just outrageous for so many.

We're seeing a lot of candidates talking to Zapier (we're fully remote) about leaving the Bay Area to go "home" (some to start a family, some for other reasons) but want to stay in their tech career.

Happy to answer any questions, and I am sure there are a lot of Zapiens in the thread that could answer questions too.

<comment><USER2> Doesn't this make it easier for you to retain people by restricting their options in the future? For example if someone moves back to central Missouri, they're probably not going to find a lot of similar jobs, especially at the level of pay I'm imaging Zapier provides.

<comment><USER3> This would be my primary worry too. When I moved to the Bay Area I took a massive quality-of-life hit. Went from a place where a big two-story 2000+ sq ft home cost $100K or so and a 15 minute commute to here, where a mud hut costs $500K and your commute is 2 hours. But I was willing to do it because it's less risky employment-wise. If things go bad at one employer here, you're looking at maybe a 1-3 month job search that you can limit to a 50 mile radius. If things go bad in Nowheresville, USA, you're looking at a 3-9 month job search that will likely involve moving out of state.

<comment><USER4> Your post makes it sound like the only place for tech jobs is the Bay Area...which I find is not true as an east coast remote.

I mean, yeah if you move to rural South Dakota you won't find much, but there are plenty of growing tech centers like Raleigh, Boulder, Austin, etc. that have much lower cost of living, but still a lot of availability in local tech jobs.

Also to note, the 3-9 month job search should be much more sustainable in Nowheresville, whereas in SF you are going to be screwed if your job search is extended.

<comment><USER5> So, honest question (not trying to troll) - what jobs are available in Raleigh/Boulder/Austin/etc?

Because where I'm sitting, facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, which are 5 of the top 6 most valuable US companies, are HQ'd in the Bay Area or Seattle. So if you want that caliber of job, with the opportunities and pay ($200-300k+ for mid-level people), you really do have to live in SF/Seattle.

I don't work a BigCo job for other reasons but the reasoning does seem sound.

<comment><USER6> Google is in Boulder. But from what I've heard of the area in general (not specific to Google), they have Bay Area housing prices with Colorado comp, so overall you are taking home less and getting less for your money.

<comment><USER7> i'm near enough to boulder that google's boulder location would be a <15 minute commute, and <$500k buys you a 2000 sqft house in a quiet neighborhood and enough of a yard you can't see through your neighbor's window. pretty sure that's rather drastically cheaper than sf. if you're ok with a 30 minute commute, you can shave $100k off that. 60 minute commute would shave another $100k off.

while i'm commenting, i'll note that i don't feel boulder really competes with NC's research triangle, or austin. boulder county population is 310k, and a sizable chunk of that is tied up in and around the university and government research facilities that i feel don't impact local tech industry that much.

<comment><USER8> Would you mind unpacking "NC research triangle"? North Carolina? Three research heavy universities?

<comment><USER9> The Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill combined metro area in North Carolina.

Home to UNC, Duke, and the somewhat famous Research Triangle Park, a suburban campus containing R&D for Red Hat, IBM, and several big pharmaceutical companies.

The Palo Alto of the South.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It benefits them to have you leave the bay area, because they know it will be much more difficult for you to find your next job. They are paying $10k now to minimize future raises and equity grants.

I can think of less risky ways to squeeze $10k out of a new employer.

<comment><USER11> I left the Bay Area in 2011 because I was tired of the endless suburban hellscape, the high cost of housing, and the poor cultural offerings (yeah SFO is great but that's a long way off).

I was worried it'd be tough to move jobs or careers and that getting new jobs would be harder.

It hasn't been. I've been steadily moving up and into new positions at new companies every 2 years just like I was in the Bay Area. My salary is 2.7x higher than it was when I left the Bay Area, and I now have a 5,000 sqft home in a great city that I paid about 1/10th as much for as I would have in the Bay Area.

<comment><USER12> > My salary is 2.7x higher

The original salary must have been low, no hate.

Different strokes for different folks. If you're working at a company that already pays well and you're not in the Bay Area, then your options for switching are either exciting but very risky startups (< $1 billion) or small satellite offices of big corps that have limited team options and little political influence (bad for advancement in senior positions). These would typically be lateral movements at best.

<comment><USER11> > The original salary must have been low, no hate.

My new salary is just much higher, I've had several major steps up. I've found salaries in major metro areas to be pretty much the same as a competitive offer in the Bay Area.

> Different strokes for different folks. If you're working at a company that > already pays well and you're not in the Bay Area, then your options for > switching are either exciting but very risky startups (< $1 billion) or > small satellite offices of big corps that have limited team options and > little political influence (bad for advancement in senior positions). These > would typically be lateral movements at best.

The Bay Area isn't the only place with a tech sector, and there are plenty of companies whose main offices aren't in the Bay Area. Washington DC, Chicago, Austin, Denver, all have tremendous tech industries. I've even had job offers at great places that are further out there.

My "one that got away" was a job offer in Portland I still think about. It was a great opportunity and a fantastic city, but I ultimately went elsewhere primarily based on the desire to bring some of my projects with me.

<comment><USER10> DC, Chicago, Austin, and Denver absolutely have booming tech industries. And rising costs of living to match.

It should not surprise anyone that wages in other top-tier cities match the Bay Area.

<comment><USER11> I'm now living in a much smaller city, and the salaries here are even higher.

Good tech companies know they have to make nationally competitive offers.

<comment><USER13> Which city, if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><USER11> Sorry. I try not to give too much info.

You wouldn't guess it if I gave you 20 questions is my bet. When I got the offer for an interview the wife and I almost passed entirely on the opportunity (I didn't apply for it they recruited me) because we thought "We don't want to live there" and I had a solid offer in Seattle and Portland, where we thought we wanted to move.

I flew out anyway as a courtesy to the VP who reached out to me because we had a long history and he told me I needed to come see what they had to offer.

Flew my wife out the next day, she was super skeptical "I'm not going to like it!" (She is also in tech). She fell in love. We bought her dream house a month later. Still in our honeymoon period with this new city, but we have never been in love with a city like this before.

<comment><USER14> I think its odd that you keeping referring to an abstract "here" as a an alternative and standard of comparison to the Bay Area but won't say where that is. This whole discussion is about geography as it relates to career.

<comment><USER15> I guess the big thing we've learned from this person's posts is that it is possible to like a city that is not SF.

<comment><USER16> And you get better offers when you're poached by a VP you are acquainted with.

It shouldn't take long to confuse your salary in these circumstances with the salaries of people working for and around you. Your immediate reference is probably that VP who is also VP :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I got to interview the team about this decision, so here are more details if you're curious: [http://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/zapier-remote-work-de- location...](http://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/zapier-remote-work-de- location.html)

<comment><USER18> No offense, but how could you avoid addressing the elephant in the room?

"Will my salary be COL adjusted?"

<comment><USER17> They offer you the job before they know if you're going to move or not, so it wouldn't make sense for that to affect the salary, unless you mentioned upfront that you planned to abscond to Iowa or wherever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am probably in the minority, but I hate remote teams. I have worked with remote teams in various timezones all my life and it has pretty much destroyed any semblance of love of work that I had. Calls in the mornings, calls in the evenings, lack of white boarding capabilities, not able to quickly tap on the shoulder and ask a question, not able to have team outings or in promptu happy hours etc. has exhausted me. I am now looking for a job with a 100% local team.

<comment><USER16> It's all about the timezone.

You can take 4-5 hour difference top, that leaves you an afternoon to work together and talk when you need to.

Any link with >8 hour difference is doomed to failure, you can't communicate at all.

On top of that, you need to all be extremely experienced and autonomous, and you need to have regular trips to meet in person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Obvious question, do they get to keep their Bay Area salary?

<comment><USER11> I did, in fact I've vastly improved my salary by leaving the Bay Area.

I can tell you my team just hired a bunch of new engineers and we mad offers 10% above Bay Area offers very much on purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wish more companies did this, not just Bay Area companies.

I'm in Texas and looking to relocate to SoCal (specifically Torrance) in the second half of this year, and while I'm hoping my employer will let me either go remote or relocate me to their LA office, I'm terrified that they won't and I'll have to find a new job (I really like my employer, so I'll only leave if I absolutely have to).

<comment><USER22> There are lots of jobs around Torrance in tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like a neat way for Zapier to take advantage of Bay Area talent without paying Bay Area salaries. This isn't really for me, because I don't like remote work and I like living in the Bay Area, but I think this is a brilliant move. However, I'd want to know what the pay scale was like before making this kind of move.

<comment><USER24> If pay were the only factor I'd take a 20%-30% pay cut to be able to move closer to my wife's family and we as a family would end up being able to save more while actually owning a huge home.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, if cost of were the only factor, I could buy 2 or 3 houses in my home town for what I pay in rent. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The Bay Area needs to re-think traffic. Perhaps the hyperloop isn't so much needed between two already congested cities, but between lots of rural areas that can feed into congested cities. Live 5 hours (by car) from the BA and get there by hyperloop in 25 minutes.

<comment><USER10> Cost and congestion are driven by the commuting time to job centers.

If Bakersfield becomes a bedroom community for San Francisco with a 25 minute commute, you can count on Bakersfield housing prices converging on Bay Area costs.

This is probably a net win for the community of Bakersfield, but it may not change things very much for you as a pre-existing worker in San Francisco.

<comment><USER26> Increasing the effective commute radius into the Bay Area such that property ownership and rental prices were driven up in the new commuter towns would also reduce the upward pressure on prices in the Bay Area and it's existing commuter towns.

<comment><USER10> Good point. Convergence of prices is a big win if it means the "center" stops rising so quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Analyzing this announcement critically, I work through the following:

1\. Why would Zapier publicize a new policy for existing employees? Cynically, that appears to be a PR opportunity.

2\. The new policy is an "experiment" that pays existing employees $10,000 to cover relocation costs to move outside the Bay Area.

3\. I assume that the employees' salaries are then adjusted for COL (this is the crux). This presents an arbitrage between the $10k and salary adjustment.

4\. Zapier is facilitating a process that, in effect, acquires employees from one location for a cheaper price than competitors, as long as those employees are willing to move outside of the Bay Area.

I don't have a comment on whether I agree or disagree; I guess it's good to support employees living where they want to. But I'd be interested in knowing 1) if employees do have their salaries adjusted for cost of living when they move and 2) where many employees ultimately end up moving to.

There is a face value lens that I can read this announcement through, but there is another lens related to the price of talent in the Bay Area. If I don't take this at face value, it's interesting to me if this carries any signal about real estate or tech salary outlook.

EDIT - Nevermind, salaries aren't adjusted for cost of living.

<comment><USER28> I read it as applying to new hires, not necessarily existing employees, so it makes sense that they'd publicize it.

If it only applies to new hires then that may make salary adjustment easier (if that's part of this).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What a refreshing idea. I'd love to hear the results after a year of this experiment.

I think the idea can apply to many cities, even outside the US. Some European cities are in the midst of a housing (availability) crisis forcing rent prices up and leaving young families to live in small apartments to be within a commutable distance to work.

</comment><comment><USER30> You should really expand this to Seattle folks as well. I've decided to stay for now, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't wistfully start looking at the housing prices in Miami after this awful winter...

<comment><USER31> Also in Seattle - housing prices have exploded to the point where many 100k+ engineers would struggle to get a 30yr mortgage on a 1 bedroom. 400k+ for a nice 1bd here (within 10 miles), not yet Silicon Valley but still quite bad.

<comment><USER32> I don't track the Seattle market closly but several people have mentioned this. Is this just the city core or all the suburbs too? How much does a 3 bedroom go for? 4 years ago, I heard it could be had for 500K. Has it doubled?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think this is a great start. More and more companies should start doing this. That way people will get convinced to take these packages and move to smaller cities where they can have better life.

It doesn't make sense to cram your family in a 700 sq. ft apartment and still pay $3500 rent for it. I like other people was very excited about bay area but after coming here I often wonder whether it is worth it. Also, 30s is where you start saving more for future. giving that money as rent makes my heart cry.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'd just like to commend the zapier folks for promoting a remote first company like this. We're distributed across 6 timezones and have built up like this for years. I always try to hire engineers where they live. This causes some complications but it's been worth it for us. We've found you have to have the right culture for it though. It's harder to "bolt on" remote.

</comment><comment><USER8> Would love to know how fundraising has been impacted by being a remote first company. Did you get resistance? Are there certain investors who are fundamentally for or against?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think there is a bit of hesitation for some VC's in backing a remote first company - but some are all for it. Investors aren't as much a hivemind as one might think - they all have different theses that impact how they interpret remote first companies.

We did raise some money in the early days (when it was much more faith than evidence) but I don't recall any concern about our remote intentions from our investors. Since then - we've reached profitability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Interesting. Does one salary stay the same with this agreement?

</comment><comment><USER36> This is my dream, and this is why I switched industries to become a programmer. One day, I will achieve the apex - beach cafe in Vietnam, tethered net connection, happily tapping away code for my full time job.

Someday....

</comment><comment><USER37> More like this, please, from everyone. God bless you for doing this.</comment>


Engine Yard Programming Contest - Win an iPhone 3GS PLUS $2k in Cloud Credit - <AUTHOR> http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/programming-contest-win-iphone-3gs-2k-cloud-credit/ We're kicking off a programming contest today that is sure to challenge even the most comp-sci heavy engineers out there, and we're excited to see what you all come up with. With the difficulty of the challenge in mind, we've got some great prizes for the winner: an iPhone 3GS AND $2,000 of Cloud (Flex or Solo) credit.
You must tweet a sequence of twelve words that when hashed is bit-wise closest to a hash of a challenge phrase that we will announce the morning of July 20th.  All words must be from a 1,000 word dictionary we will provide at that same time. You are allowed to append up to five random characters to the end of your entry. We're pretty confident you'll want to write a program to automate the finding of close matches, so announcing this a week in advance should give you enough time to get your programs up and running.
See the blog post for more details, rules and prizes! <comment><USER2> Hey, if you guys are working on this, check out these papers on SHA1 collisions:

generated in 2^39 perms - <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dbrumley/srg/spring06/sha-0.pdf>

generated in 2^52 perms - <http://eprint.iacr.org/2009/259.pdf>

Since it would take an average supercomputer 5-6 days to generate the collision, I think I'm going to give the contest a rest (generating something close isn't useful outside the contest).

Another way to go about this is to sort huge rainbow tables by distance, which have been already created by a few reverse hash lookups ( <http://md5.rednoize.com/> , <http://hashcrack.com>, <http://sha1-lookup.com> ) - You'll probably need to contact them directly or hurry up and make your own.

Here's the SHA1 algorithm itself for anyone interested: (Google Cache) [http://126.96.36.199/search?q=cache:QjZpAaNXJr0J:https://www...](http://220.127.116.11/search?q=cache:QjZpAaNXJr0J:https://www.reverse- engineering.net/viewtopic.php%3Ff%3D6%26t%3D1208+reverse+sha-1&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER3> Those papers reference a collision attack, which is not the same thing as the point of this contest. The papers describe ways to generate pairs of messages that will hash to the same value.

The contest describes a preimage attack, where one has a hash value and must guess an input which would have generated that hash. SHA-1 has no known preimage vulnerabilities, so the contest winner will either have to be lucky or break SHA-1.

The best advice would probably be to iterate the keyspace in a novel way and hope you happen upon a good match that someone else doesn't get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad to see it's a fun challenge and not a "code an app for our platform" type contest. Those have really started to annoy me as they seem very close to spec work.

</comment><comment><USER5> I might suggest that there's some irony in suggesting that one use Ruby to write an algorithm that's going to basically be 100% compute bound . . . seems like this contest is a classic example of exactly the sort of problem where you do, in fact, care about raw language performance.

<comment><USER6> I don't see anywhere on the page where they suggest Ruby. As you mention, it is a terrible choice.

<comment><USER5> Well, the example they give includes the words Ruby, DHH, active, record, rspec, mongrel, jruby, and rubinius as the potential dictionary, and they close the post with "The Ruby community is nothing if not persistent, creative and intelligent — so show us what you've got!" So I'm kind of assuming the contest is aimed at the Ruby community.

<comment><USER7> feel free to write the code in any language or platform you want, we don't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is smart. After the contest, anytime you search for one of the terms in their dictionary on search.twitter.com, then @engineyard will show up (assuming there are a lot of entries).

All they have to do is make the dictionary include terms that potential engineyard customers might search for on Twitter.

<comment><USER9> Not exactly 'anytime' since Twitter search history doesn't go back that far. I can't find the link now, but I'm pretty sure it only searches up to about 30 days back.

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 Just to be clear, there is probably no realistic way of winning this without having lots and lots and lots of computing resources available to you once the dictionary is released, is there?

Since you need to choose a twelve word permutation from a possible set of one thousand words, plus append a 0-5 character random string, calculate the SHA1 hash for all possible permutations, and calculate the Hamming distance of each to the hash of the challenge phrase... correct?

      1000! / 982! permutations of dictionary words * 36^5 permutations of random chars

<comment><USER10> What about..

"You may permute capitalization for the dictionary words (i.e. you may use Ruby, rUby, RUBY, and RUBy)"

<comment> brown9-2 Forgot to consider that; along with the fact that the 5 random characters can be any printable ASCII characters, not just alphanumeric.

So this is somewhere upwards of 10^50 phrases to hash (in a naive implementation), right?

<comment><USER11> Well, are you also including the fact that there is nothing forbidding repeated words?

<comment><USER12> While this has a marginal effect on the total number of possible hashes, repeated words are still an important consideration: If you can guess even one word that is likely to appear in their 1000-word dictionary, you can precompute the hashes for all possible variants of the corresponding phrase (that word repeated twelve times) prior to the contest, giving you a jump on other contestants.

I'd guess that we'll either see the rules revised to prevent this or see a dictionary filled with non-dictionary words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IMO, this seems to be more of a "lottery for nerds" than a programming contest.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's some math:

[http://www38.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281000+choose+12%29+...](http://www38.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281000+choose+12%29+*+%282^72%29+*+%2895+choose+5%29)

The real killer is the allowed capitalization of any letter. If we assume that the average word length will be 6 characters, then we can assume that the average character length of any 12 word string will be 72 (not counting spaces).

With capitalization, the permutations act like a bit string. That is, the capitalization is either on or off. This gives us 2^72.

The resulting hash space is somewhere near (1000 choose 12) * (2^72) * (95 choose 5), or roughly 2^188.

</comment><comment><USER15> Engine Yard seems to suggest that renting cloud computing resources is the key to win this contest, but I'd suggest using parallel computing resources to anyone doing this. If you have an Nvidia CUDA-enabled GPU laying around, this might be perfect for you.

</comment><comment><USER16> Any tips for walking to nearby hashes from HN's crypto-gurus?

<comment><USER17> This is the sort of thing that hash functions are designed to avoid.

Since getting closer words does not get you a closer hash, usual optimization algorithms (like genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, etc.) are not going to be helpful.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I think brute force and luck are going to win this contest, assuming that SHA1 is not broken between now and July 20th. If you want an iPhone 3G S, you should probably just head over to the Apple store and buy one and spend your valuable time on something else.

<comment><USER16> I'm aware that this is what hashes are supposed to avoid. However, many crypto attacks seem to build on weaknesses in their design.

Hence my question.

<comment><USER18> If someone had come up with something like you suggested it would have been a lot bigger news and this "contest" really wouldn't have happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's like Swoopo for compute cycles!

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm definitely not great at this kind of stuff, but I'll give it a try ...

Check out the Amatch ruby gem ... it can compute the hamming distance ... might be easy to automate with ruby ...

<http://amatch.rubyforge.org/doc/index.html>

<comment><USER21> Except doing this through Ruby is a guaranteed bet to not get done in time.

<comment><USER22> I agree that the gem mentioned might not be suitable, but Ruby could still have a part to play, especially as it allows direct use of native libraries, or just managing processes running on the OS.

Someone doing this should probably write the fast-spinning cogs in C, but it might be worth using Ruby to manage threads, processes, data segments, etc - indeed, maybe prototype the C code there first too. You'd gain an awful lot of convenience for very little overhead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anyone able to break 10 using the example they gave?

      "I am not a big believer in fortune telling"

<comment><USER24> 10 is a stretch. After a couple hours of computing several hundreds of millions of attempts, the best I achieved was a distance of 43 bits (assuming duplicate words are acceptable).

jruby rubinius MRI Cloud postgresSQL record MRI exception record mongrel tokyo Cloud

This task is so unbalanced as a contest. The thought of spending a couple hundred dollars of cloud computing time to just buy more 'lottery tickets' for $3000 worth of prizes (assuming you could use the cloud time) is too much of a stretch for me.

<comment><USER25> 10 is a _huge_ stretch. My testing in C++ agrees with you. The lowest score I've gotten is 41 after about 12 hours. Sure, I may get lucky and get one in the high 30's or something, but it would just be blind luck and persistence, nothing more. Not a very cool contest IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Cool contest, but starting it on a Monday morning sucks pretty badly.

<comment><USER27> You should be coding it now, you know what all of the rules are. Come Monday, you would just plug in the desired hash value and word dictionary and let it run for the 24 hours of the contest.

I think I'm going to try to put something together this weekend just for the heck of it. It would be cool if they published the code (with permission) of the top submitters, just to see how they went about solving it.

<comment><USER26> If you can seriously write software and not have to tweak it to run as you go for this type of challenge, then my hat is off to you. Unfortunately, I'm a mere mortal and would mostly likely need to make changes once I see the "real" data / dictionary.

<comment><USER27> You could make your own word dictionary, pick 12 random words (and append a few random characters to the end of the string) and come up with your own hash.

Now that you have the hash and the word dictionary, you "forget" that you know the real string, and you set your program to try to find it.

At least that would make sure there weren't any major bugs in it (logic bugs not included) before you tried to solve the real problem. Since you only have 24 hours to crack it, every extra second will count ;)

<comment><USER26> I don't think we're talking about the same issue.

Of course you'd have to write the application before the 20th. My point is that for people with day jobs, Mondays are almost always the busiest day of the week so I'm sure that will preclude a number of people from participating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is this a marketing or a recruitment exercise? Or both? :-)

<comment><USER27> At least marketing, perhaps a bit of recruiting if you come up with a clever solution. If they aren't hiring, perhaps some else that is will see your name up on the leaderboard.</comment></comment>


How I build a poker bot - <AUTHOR> http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working-online-poker-bot-1

<comment><USER2> Many comments and thoughtful discussion from last time this was submitted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185830>

</comment><comment><USER3> Link appears to be dead.</comment>