What if you've really, really had it with city life? What if it's not enough for you to move your home and career to a small metropolis like Providence, Rhode Island, Boise, Idaho, or Ann Arbor, Michigan? Could the small-town scene be for you?

Good news: There is intelligent life -- and career opportunity -- in the boonies, whether looking at Charlottesville, Virginia, Bozeman, Montana, Ithaca, New York, or other towns with populations downwards of 35,000. But you still need to ask yourself and your potential employer some tough questions before you abandon the grind of cyber cities for the quaint pleasures of silicon villages.

Case Study: Northern Berkshires, Massachusetts

Williamstown, Massachusetts, is a picturesque New England town in the Berkshire Mountains. Home to Williams College, a top-rated liberal arts school, Williamstown has long been something of a cultural mecca, even if a bit sleepy.

But the area's appealing natural beauty, good schools and willingness to experiment have clearly hooked Bill Densmore Jr., a vice president and cofounder of Williamstown-based ClickShare Service Corp. “I've been skiing with my wife and kids most Wednesday afternoons this winter,” says Densmore. “I make up for it by many long nights working at home after the kids go to bed.”

Densmore says the area's arts institutions, including Tanglewood, Jacob's Pillow and the Clark Art Institute, together with outdoor recreation opportunities, “can make the difference in recruiting committed, stable staff.”

Rick Lerner, vice president of technology at ClickShare, says the dotcom shakeout of 2000 has made it a little bit easier to woo talent to the bucolic Berkshires. Although Williamstown's superior schools make it preferable for families with kids, the neighboring town of North Adams “is the up-and-coming location for tech companies,” says Lerner.

The North Adams Effect

Driving into North Adams, a settlement whose aging mill buildings exude small-town grit, the lure isn't obvious. But just outside the diminutive downtown is a maze of brick buildings that has been rehabbed to serve two complementary ends: avant-garde art and high-tech business. In a unique collaboration, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art , which opened in 1999, is boosting its revenues and forging ties with the business community by leasing out some of its abundant space to startups such as eZiba.com Inc. an e-commerce company, Streetmail.com Inc., a network of local email newspapers, and Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co., a movie special-effects studio.

Low costs were a big draw for Jeff Kleiser, president of Kleiser-Walczak, which is best known for its special-effects work in X-Men. In major cities, businesses often pay rent of $50 or more per square foot; at MassMoca, the advertised rates are $5 to $15. Kleiser says that North Adams provides a calming home base for business trips to clients and the firm's other offices in Hollywood and New York City.

Costs (and Salaries) Are Lower

Those reasonable real estate rates carry over into the residential sector, a key factor for high-tech workers. A house that costs $340,000 in Boston might be $180,000 in Williamstown, says Matt Harris, CEO of Village Ventures, a venture capital firm there.

Salaries are discounted as well. Programmers in the Northern Berkshires might make 80 to 85 percent the pay of their big-city counterparts, and marketers and finance specialists might only make 65 to 70 percent of the top rates, according to Harris. But the cost of living in this rural area is 30 to 40 percent lower, he says.

Harris does sound a note of caution for professionals, who consider moving to a silicon village in these economically uncertain times. “The problem is that you don't have 20 other companies to move around to” if your employer fails, he says. But for the legions of city-weary dotcom workers with underwater stock options, change might be beckoning their names. If they think, “This isn't a situation that's going to get liquid in the next 18 months,” going to the country may make sense for them.

If you do take a chance on a silicon village, don't lose track of your connections back in the metropolis. After a few years in a small town's open spaces, some folks decide the grass is actually much greener in an urban jungle.