Ok, yes, that's true; lack of job "liquidity" can negate the effects of a hot market. If there are only two places to work in your town, you have to think twice before leaving the safer once.

I never considered it before, but this is another benefit of startup hubs for the best startups: it's easier for people to leave their employers to come work for you. Of course you die by that same sword when you get sufficiently big, but that's a good problem to have.

Having moved from Perth to Silicon Valley I've got to second this. In Australia I'd get approached about jobs maybe every couple of months while in Silicon Valley I get approached every couple of days.

While I primarily do security rather that software, in Australia the approach would be "Are you interested in contract work for Reputable Government Agency / Mining Company / Bank?" while in Silicon Valley is "Hot new VC funded startup looking for a rockstar to secure the social local cloud!".

I'm really enjoying the difference.

It's funny how we hand-wring about why there's only an anemic startup culture in Australia. Leaving aside the storied legal barriers, there's the fact that the E-3 visa makes it much easier for bright Australian technologists to decamp to the USA.

Until certain developments in my life made it an impossibility, I was thinking of moving to New York. Because it's the most unalike[1] English-speaking place with a vibrant startup scene I could think of to live in.

[1] unalike from Darwin. Even Perth is a megapolis compared to that beautiful flyspeck.

A million times this. I'm in Auckland, New Zealand and it's quite scary sometimes when you run in to people trying to pretend they're in the valley the way they run their startup. It just is not the same out here: less money, less funded startups, less startups in general, very few supporting anything more than the founders, if they even do that. SV and NYC are outliers globally.

I'm in Brisbane and I'm doing some freelance for a US start-up right now. I kind of stumbled into this work, but would like to take more of it on in future.

I think it would be great if there were some better tools for tracking and working with remote hackers. I think the virtual office is so close to becoming a reality.

I would agree, to an extent. (Even) in tech work right now there's a huge bias against remote workers.

The market is hot.... Assuming you live in SF or NYC. It's pretty dry - even for tech - if you live somewhere else. (just look on github jobs and count the number of jobs accepting remote workers)

I'm not sure better tools would solve the problem. Between web based trackers/document collaborators/Skype/Google Hangouts, it feels like we have most of the tools we need (except maybe a good whiteboard tool).

There are biases against remote work (in most cases). In some cases it might be, "oh, we neeeeeed high Bandwidth of seeing people in same room" (maybe, maybe not). In some cases it might boil down to someone equating "seeing butts in chairs" with "working". Or, "we've always been in one room, why change?"

The tools are there: Web based bug trackers, email, Skype/Hangouts, pairing via screen/tmux (granted pairing is an market ripe for even better tools), GitHub... And yes it's some effort to use these tools, but it's a pretty low barrier.

I think the virtual office will become a reality once people overcome their bias... Which is a human problem, not a problem we can solve with Mr Turing's Machine.

> I think it would be great if there were some better tools for tracking and working with remote hackers.

I've been freelancing lately.

There are probably thousands of such tools. Pretty much every freelancer ever has cobbled one together and some substantial fraction have gone on to release it.

Pivotal Tracker not your style? Try WorkflowMax. Or briefcase. Or IMS Service Track. Or SmartBiller. Or Jobsheet. Or ProWorkflow. Or TriggerApp. Or ...