I did the math on this about 1.5 years ago and came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth it. I was, at the time, in a CTO-level position at a VC-funded startup and so had plenty of opportunities in the Bay, but in the end opted to live in a quiet country town about 2.5 hrs drive away and work from home in a lower-key role.
I have a 3yo kid and another on the way, and I do not regret my decision for one second, particularly when I hear horror stories from my stressed-out friends in SF/SJ. Also we can easily pay the mortgage on one salary and my wife is able to finish her PhD without us going into debt.
For us, it wasn't just about salary vs cost of living, but also about the stresses of big city life, competing for limited places in overtaxed childcare, sitting in traffic for hours every day, and being surrounded by other parents enduring the same tortures. No thanks.
This is open source. You can run it locally, host it yourself, put it on Heroku -- whatever your heart desires. And, yes, you can always just use WordPress.com (for free, btw). And that's just out of the box; The sky's the limit if you get involved as a contributor (and you should!)
Where does this leave WordPress.org? Well, let's put it this way: There will be a lot more people building cool things on top of the WordPress.org REST API now that this project has shown what can be done (I expect that over time the REST API will accumulate all the abilities of the Jetpack API)
Does there have to be a better strategy for WordPress.org? I don't fear for a project that has already claimed 25% of the web and is growing market share faster than any other CMS.
We're looking for talented Rails and Javascript developers, project managers and designers.
Fun office in downtown LA packed with great developers building new kind of product - a "Community Organising System" (COS) with the goal of empowering leaders and creators around the world.
We're backed by Andreessen-Horowitz and Sean Parker, among others.
Downtown Los Angeles, Full Time, software developers and designers.
NationBuilder is a Community Organising System.
All the great positive changes in society have been driven by the millenia-old art of Community Organising. Moses, Martin Luther King Jr and Ghandi were Community Organisers.
The Internet provides the sheer reach to grow new movements faster than before, but the tools have been difficult to integrate and use, or they have been directed towards throwing animated cows rather than bringing people together to solve problems.
NationBuilder seeks to bring the power of community organising to the web for the lowest possible price so that grass-roots leaders can assemble followers in real-time, at scale, to create positive social change at a pace and scale that has never been seen before. Fundamentally, it brings together your web site, social integration, communications, and CRM in one place.
We are already changing US politics, but that is just the beginning. We seek to empower everyone in the world who wants to be a leader to build their community, whether they're a film-maker, a blogger, a grandma, a political dissident, a small business owner, or all of the above.
To do this, we have assembled a world-class team of Ruby on Rails hackers. Everyone is a full-stack developer and committed to the highest possible standards of excellence. Unlike everyone else in this space, we are fundamentally a tech company - not a consultancy, a think-tank, or the tech wing of a political party.
We practice continuous deployment. Committed code can be pushed to production in less than 5 minutes - and that INCLUDES running the full test suite on our CI platform.
We practice promiscuous pairing. You will be working directly with great people who know the product inside and out.
You will be using the latest Retina Macbook Pro or Macbook Air, working in one of the coolest spaces in Downtown LA with access to the best restaurants, arts, culture and weather in the US. The cost of living is low and the lifestyle is great. There is an epic 2-level restaurant/bar on our roof.
We have a real product with thousands of customers, yet our tech team is just 11 people. Anyone who joins today will have a massive influence on the product and market.
Our recent Series A was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sean Parker, and angel investors include Chris Hughes. Sean Parker and Ben Horowitz are on our board, and our co-founders Jim Gilliam and Jesse Haff built Brave New Films and took on the Iraq War and Walmart while creating an entirely new model of film financing and distribution.
If all this sounds interesting, get in touch. Check out http://nationbuilder.com/jobs and then email jobs@nationbuilder.com.
NationBuilder is looking for web developers to join our team building the world's first online Community Organising System in downtown LA.
We are committed to excellence in engineering - we practice TDD/BDD, pairing, continuous integration/deployment and Scrum-style agile development. One of our favourite things to do is delete code. We're weird like that.
We move fast. Any developer can commit and have their code in production in under 20 minutes, including the test suite running. No bureaucracy, no branch-merging with code reviews, no scheduled downtime. Build a feature and get it into thousands of people's hands in under an hour.
We have a fun, creative, open culture that encourages free expression and diversity. You won't find brogrammers here, just great people doing their best work.
We're well-funded (Andreessen-Horowitz, Sean Parker, Chris Hughes and others) and we're looking to change the world.
Just a year after beta, we're already shaking up politics, the non-profit/advocacy sector, and enabling filmmakers and musicians to liberate themselves from old models of marketing and distribution.
This journey is just beginning, and an exciting road lies ahead. If you're interested in joining us, we'd love to talk to you.
http://www.goldsounds.com/yoyo/