Physical Relocation of Employees: Is It Becoming Outmoded?

Physical Relocation of Employees: Is It Becoming Outmoded?

Back when I was working in a DSL access multiplexer startup in California, I started writing a paper about how rapid deployment of broadband residential services was going to transform American society--if we allowed it do so. I argued that increasingly, instead of moving from city to city when they changed jobs, knowledge workers would simply reconfigure their VPN (Virtual Private Network) settings to change jobs. I examined in detail the cultural changes that would result from this--and what I considered the most important was the gradual decline of big cities.

At least in Western civilization, big cities have been the exception. Rome had somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people (and the high end seems unlikely to me) at its peak, and it was many centuries before any other city even begin to approach those numbers. It was the beginning of the nineteenth century before London reached a million people. Aside from national capitals (which have the unfortunate habit of sucking in vast quantities of money from the nation or empire, and the people then follow), there were no really big cities until the Industrial Revolution required vast numbers of workers in big factories and supporting industries. The consequences were generally ugly and producing of depravity: extremes of wealth and poverty; disease; anonymity with destructive effects on public morals and crime; the Democratic Party (which is pretty much all those problems rolled into one).

If workers could change where they work by reconfiguring some network parameters, instead of physically moving where they lived, it means that where they lived wouldn't be tied to where they work. You don't want to live crammed cheek-by-jowl with several million other people, suffering air pollution, traffic jams, two hour commutes, crime, naked people having sex in the streets? Well, you don't have to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can work somewhere else. Maybe you have to fly in occasionally to confer with your colleagues, but why should an employer spend $5000-$10,000 relocating you and your family to have you work for them? Especially these days, when you have no idea how long that employer--or employee--is going to last?

And for the employer, why should they have to pay $130,000 per year salary to hire someone to compensate for the fact that houses in the Bay Area are hideously expensive, when you can buy a comparable house in a nicer neighborhood in most of the United States for 1/3 the price?

Part of what motivated my little rant about this--and the importance of employers being flexible--is that someone pointed me to this job ad for people with an MA in History (and they will consider outstanding BAs). I know someone that might be a good match for this, especially because his specialization was Asian history--but custody questions pretty well prohibit him from moving to the East Coast. I'm guessing that there are a lot of other people in similar situations--and that's a shame, because the CIA needs all the good people it can get in a dangerous world like today.