Move to Canada!

[Adam L. Beberg]

On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Owen Byrne wrote:

> San Francisco is the most expensive North American city for a high-tech
> company do to business, with an estimated average cost of $43 million a
> year, according to The Boyd Company, a consulting firm that advises
> major companies on location planning. For example, a company relocating
> to Baltimore from San Francisco would see a savings of about 21 percent,
> according to the study's figures.

Some /.: "The cost of living here is SUPER low.. plus.. you can hire
VBscript monkies to work on ASP sites for $8/hour" Most of the rest of the
comments beat on this same topic, many leading to the "Why goto canada, goto
India you fools!" line of thought.

It's all about the labor costs.

  43M in San Fran
- health insurance
- exchange rate
- high pay
+ advanced 2002 FedEx system
+ Internet
---------
= 27.7M O Canada! book that 15M in profits - pro-forma of course.

Even with 7.5% unemployment in SiValley and so much office space and
appartments empty there are more for rent signs then street signs (not hard
to do), the cost of living out here is still 2-3x other places.

Of course, like Argentinians, (now at 2.10 peso/$) all the debt is still in
US dollars, so ya gotta go where the pay is the highest and live as cheap as
you can.

(which brings up the point of if unemployment is so high and the savings
rate was never good, and debt was already at crisis levels, and the stock
market crashed - just where the heck are consumers getting the money to keep
spending at the current all time record levels, hmmmmmmmmmm)

Basicly the recession has broken the leverage the workers had. There are now
masses of highly (and lowly) skilled workers out of work, and since wages
are one of those things on a steep S-curve, companies can now pay a fraction
of what they did before. Which of course gets management thinking "well, if
we can offer 50k to a 20yr veteran in San Fran now, there must be a place we
can offer 20k right?" Tech work is now clearly in the "wherever it's
cheapest" category like t-shirts and plastic childrens toys. Market forces
will push it all to asia.

For degree people this is not-in-demand thing is new, but for the blue
collar, a recession is old hat. You form unions, use certifications to limit
work opportunities, and help get your friends and family hired etc. I doubt
the business leaders are gonna let the demand situation get so out of
control anytime soon, especially under king Bush. Remember that recesions
are good for business and help concentrate wealth.

Demand for tech workers in the US is definately not going up (probably ever
again) so we'll see how long it takes for them to learn what the blue
collars know and adapt. Should be interesting to see this coming falls
college entrace numbers, I expect we'll see less CS/EE students and more
business types.

- Adam L. "Duncan" Beberg
  http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/
  beberg@mithral.com