Their HQ was designed / built when it looked like they would grow forever and before the pandemic encouraged a lot of 'hybrid' options. The complex is (afaik) still 3/4 Uber, 1/4 OpenAI after this - it was nearly 1 million sq ft of office space.
Famously big towers are an indicator that a company or economy is about to slow down hard, since they only get financed during frothy market conditions.
The big poster child for this is Sears opening the biggest office tower in the world at the time.
Uber has four office buildings in SF mission bay. One was never used, the other 3 were underutilized, so employees are going to be moved/consolidated into 2. These buildings also have street-front retail lease spaces, so presumably by having more people coming into the area, that increases foot traffic for those spaces as well.
All the actual news on the SF real estate market is waiting for the effects of various local laws being flatly overridden by the state [1], which will take about six months from now to get to the 'or else' point of huge amounts of state funding being pulled from the city.
In particular, it will completely eliminate discretionary review for most projects, which is an overwhelming source of construction delays and cost inflation in SF.
With all the doom and gloom SF news, much of which is also unwarranted, it’s reasonable to have some possibly unwarranted, non gloom and doom news as well.
OpenAI (https://fortune.com/2023/05/05/openai-ceo-sam-altman-remote-...) is a example of a high performing company where remote work is an exception. That's why I say that there is no cake recipe that guarantees that remote or in-person work is better than the other. Each company has its own culture and employees have to look for the culture that makes the most sense for them.
The more common expression is "cookie cutter" implying that anyone can follow a simple process to achieve a good result. Cake is hard in general so even having the cake recipe is fairly useless for execution.
Remote work seems like a bigger liability for a company which is expecting future legal battles and anti-trust cases, especially since all communications will be entered into discovery. It's easier for VPs to discuss AI ethics in hallways and unrecorded meetings rooms.
Yea, ya know... if your reason for avoiding remote work is because you're afraid a paper trail will expose your company breaking the law.... your company.... has some big problems lol.
Similar to Apple. Apple seems to understand whatever this sort of structure is really well, and have followed it for a long time. Facebook thought they were different but now they seem to need the same. Less openness externally, but a lot of collaboration internally. Google recognized this more quickly than Facebook, but less quickly than Apple.
> That's why I say that there is no cake recipe that guarantees that remote or in-person work is better than the other.
I'm not sure this is all that insightful. I don't think anyone is saying that if you force all your employees into the same physical space (or, you allow for remote work) you will instantly become infinitely successful.
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The big poster child for this is Sears opening the biggest office tower in the world at the time.
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In particular, it will completely eliminate discretionary review for most projects, which is an overwhelming source of construction delays and cost inflation in SF.
[1]: https://www.sfyimby.org/sf-yimby-blog/housing-policy-and-pra..., see the report PDF at https://www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/docs/policy-and-r...
You should really choose a different saying
Disclaimer: I'm working remotely at Microsoft
Facebook, Google, Apple have been laying off people. The return to office was about real estate, local power and getting employees to move or quit.
I'm not sure this is all that insightful. I don't think anyone is saying that if you force all your employees into the same physical space (or, you allow for remote work) you will instantly become infinitely successful.
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