Leaving NYC for Nashville
14th January 2019
Wes McKinney makes a good case for it.
One thing is certain: many companies based in major cities like NYC and SF are extremely effective at extracting high quality labor from the world’s most talented young people. It should be no surprise why wealthy corporations want this to be: it is immensely profitable. In a single quarter in 2017, Facebook made around $450,000 in revenue and $190,000 in profit per employee. As Jeff Hammerbacher infamously put it: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
I’ve increasingly felt that open source development is at odds with the values that are driving a large portion of the corporate world, particularly in the United States. Many companies won’t fund open source work because there is no “return on investment”. This is deeply frustrating, and being surrounded by people whose actions align with profit-motive can be pretty discouraging. It’s not necessarily that people who work in NYC or SF are greedy or amorally concerned with making money. In many cases they are just responding to incentives coming from pretty low on the hierarchy of needs.