The nature of employment in the US has changed very rapidly in the past few decades. Agriculture and manufacturing jobs have evaporated, replaced by service jobs. Globalization means that any job that doesn't need to be performed inside the US will likely leave the US.
What this means is that in the past, there used to be forces that encouraged jobs to be somewhat evenly spread across the country. Most medium-sized cities had a number of factories, small towns were surrounded by farms, etc.
Now the only jobs are jobs that involve working with or for other people, so you see a rapid concentration in a smaller number of large metro areas.
Unfortunately, cities cannot physically adapt as quickly as the economy has changed. The rapid change in housing prices — upwards in metro areas and downwards elsewhere — is basically a measure of how much the physical infrastructure is out of sync with today's needs.
Personally, I hope we figure out a way reinvigorate and distribute jobs across medium-sized cities. It's very difficult for the poor any elderly to uproot, and the US has tons of space, so I think it's better for everyone if the jobs come to them instead of forcing them to come to the jobs.
In theory, yep. In practice, lots of software work is basically an exercise in interpersonal collaboration logistics for which physical colocation is still the most common approach. I've long been hopeful that we'd break out of that model and achieve the geographic redistribution that the parent commenter is hopeful for, but that it hasn't happened yet makes me think there is something more to it than it seems.
Many many aren't. One of the reasons I left EA was because half of my team was given the task of training a team of outsourced people to replace them.
Yes, there are still plenty of programming jobs in the US, in large part because a key part of the job is translating human requirements into code. That means that knowing the language and culture are valuable assets. Also, English is the lingua franca of software, which helps.
But a lot of them aren't anymore. I'd say 70% of my team is offshore. Before it became popular to offshore, they would have all been local. There's been many offices around me in the financial industry that have consolidated IT departments into much smaller local shops, closing offices here.
What this means is that in the past, there used to be forces that encouraged jobs to be somewhat evenly spread across the country. Most medium-sized cities had a number of factories, small towns were surrounded by farms, etc.
Now the only jobs are jobs that involve working with or for other people, so you see a rapid concentration in a smaller number of large metro areas.
Unfortunately, cities cannot physically adapt as quickly as the economy has changed. The rapid change in housing prices — upwards in metro areas and downwards elsewhere — is basically a measure of how much the physical infrastructure is out of sync with today's needs.
Personally, I hope we figure out a way reinvigorate and distribute jobs across medium-sized cities. It's very difficult for the poor any elderly to uproot, and the US has tons of space, so I think it's better for everyone if the jobs come to them instead of forcing them to come to the jobs.