All: can you please not post low-quality angry/snarky junk comments to HN threads? They're tedious and have nasty effects.
I realize this story is a cluster of divisive topics but that's why HN's guidelines say "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
There is a famous paper about the location of company headquarters: they get as close as possible to the residence of company CEOs. If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm actually curious if the location of company headquarters has to do with the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day. And this is probably just me or my circles, a city's hustle and bustle becomes a distraction or at least increasing irrelevant as I age. I increasingly enjoy ample parking space, tranquil suburbs, being able to step out and start jogging in woods or huge parks, and certainly not having to deal with the craziness on SF streets. If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF.
Just in response to your second point, I do think that's specific to you and your circles. I know multiple retired or semi-retired people who have moved towards the center of a city. Without work to keep them occupied, they want the hustle and bustle, which means something to do. And driving has become more of a hassle and a barrier to the kinds of lives they want to live. These are east coast or midwest cities, so maybe there is something about SF that's different, but that's my experience.
Also, a lot of older people don't want big houses, and having easy access to amenities and socialization is more important than having extra empty bedrooms.
You're talking about different age groups. You mention retired people (who are likely empty nesters), but the age group OP is talking about are middle-aged CEOs with young kids or teenagers.
anecdotally, city life becomes a net drain when one doesn't have time for themselves. In my mid-thirties now, and keeping up with family/travel/hobbies is more than I can handle on most days. I've gone to a great number of restaurants in the past and ... getting more sleep seems like a better bet for the day then going to another restaurant.
I'm sure that this will flip when I no longer have kids at home and have reached retirement.
> I know multiple retired or semi-retired people who have moved towards the center of a city
Is it because their kids have grown up? I can imagine myself living in a city like Paris or NY if I don't have kids. I get to enjoy a bustling city without needing to dealing with the challenges of raising kids.
> I do think that's specific to you and your circles. I know multiple retired or semi-retired people...
Just a note that this reversal could just as easily be specific to you and your circles.
In this thread all we have is two people who find anecdotally that some older people move to live near where they themselves live. Given how many people make some kind of change in retirement that's hardly surprising. We'd need actual data to come to any conclusion about large-scale trends.
Back in the early 90s my wife and I moved to SF because it had a thriving art and music scene and more interesting culture than the 'burbs of palo alto. But as you say, the long commute to SV was a killer and we moved back down. Back then SF was a bedroom community for SV with no tech sector. Businesses up there were banking (Wells Fargo, BofA, Crocker etc), retail, the local stock exchange, and a bunch of manufacturing.
Nowadays there's a bland sameness -- barely any music or other art much less much craziness. You can't imagine anything like the psychedelic scene appearing in SF much less Palo Alto these days, and most of what's left is in Oakland. Sigh.
I lived in San Francisco in the very late 70s through to the 00s. My first apartment share was $50/mo. The late 70s had the dying embers of the Beat Generation and San Francisco was a sleepy town. San Francisco was great in the 80s with a ton of theater, music, dance, art, everything. It was good in the 90s although the late 90s dotcom boom pushed/priced artists out. The 00s became pretty boring and compressed. I moved to Oakland.
I would say that San Francisco is quite nice now, great bones, although too expensive for interesting people to live.
Depends on one's interests. It sounds like my preferences would be more in alignment with yours - music and art - and yes, SF is almost completely lacking that today. But if one were an active part of the LGBT community - SF is a buzzing option. They have various festivals and events almost daily.
Oakland music scene isn't particularly inspiring either. Definitely more independent music events in run down houses, but quality and inventiveness is too often of questionable value.
it's true, the techies of the '90s and '00s who lived in sf embraced the culture (and suffered the commute). what happened in the '10s kinda steamrolled it.
> There is a famous paper about the location of company headquarters: they get as close as possible to the residence of company CEOs.
Boeing. That's what killed Boeing - moving HQ from the factory in Renton, WA to Chicago. Boeing has no plants anywhere near Chicago. But Dave Calhoun, the previous CEO lived in Chicago. He previously was the head of Nielsen, the TV ratings and marketing company, which has been in Chicago for a century.
It took far too long, but Calhoun is finally being eased out. Not fired outright, which would have been appropriate.
> If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm actually curious if the location of company headquarters has to do with the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day.
IME this is definitely true and it's often very intentional. One of the major reasons SF stole the startup scene from SV is that younger startup employees wanted to live in SF. As a startup founder you are very strongly incentivized to go where the talent is (or wants to be). When I was considering where to set up my startup a few months ago this was a huge consideration. Not quite at the level of HQ, but there's a reason Google has offices in both SF and South Bay as well, or in both SLU/SLU-area Seattle + across Lake Washington.
> If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF.
I don't think it's about more vs less as much as matching the demographics of your typical employee. Eg experience levels, pay, work culture, personality, mix of job roles
Google has offices in San Francisco but it also has offices in South San Francisco, San Bruno, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and San Jose. And probably some other cities I forgot. The "reason" Google has an office anywhere has to do more with "why not" rather than anything else.
The mentioned South Bay locations are xAI's Palo Alto office, and an office in Santana Row. Both locations likely have connections to Caltrain.
I don't know where xAI's Palo Alto office is, but transit in the corporate Palo Alto office are generally good. If xAI is in the Stanford Research Park, you'll be taking a shuttle that runs only during commute times, and takes 15-30 minutes, depending on where exactly you get off.
Santana Row is more confusing. You'll travel either to Santa Clara or San Jose and take a bus. From Santa Clara, the bus is ~15 minutes. From San Jose, the bus is faster, but you've got a half- or one-mile walk.
The Santana Row office is miserable to get to via Caltrain. You're going to want to bike or scooter and even then it's a trip on Stevens Creek/San Carlos, which is exceptionally busy at all times of day due to the two malls next to it and also it drops bike lanes for some portion of the road.
i concur. I think a lot of this is just sound business acumen.
Twit-er...X, isnt raking in cash like it used to. Musks changes like reinstating hate speech accounts and the blue check fiasco had a direct negative effect on advertising revenue and accelerated already downward subscriber trends. Leaning out the physical side of the already agile digital side was a good idea im not sure twitters old guard would have considered.
San Francisco has seen a talent exodus after the global pandemic. no senior SRE with 20 years of experience --whos also made to show up to the office five days a week-- is going to entertain San Francisco's traffic, crime, homelessness, or general congestion for even a minute.
fwiw, hiring senior talent in SF works just fine. If you pay at the right pricing tier. SF is a decent city. It could definitely do better, it has issues, but if we all could stop pretending it's a post apocalyptic hellscape, that'd be nice.
Yes, you pay an SF premium. You pay a premium for most major cities, and the worse housing is, the higher the premium. But I'd bet moving to the South Bay isn't happening for that reason. SF pricing has a halo effect on the South Bay, and your savings will be minimal, if any. (I see little differences in South Bay and SF salaries, for larger companies)
What I'd wager precipitated the move is SF rents are stupidly high , and then you combine that with half the twitter offices being empty. If you believe loopt, San Jose office space is ~ half the cost of SF. Half the space, at half again cost - their real estate bill shrinks by 75%. And given that Twitters bill is likely ~$40M-50M/month, that's a good chunk of savings.
Here in India, it's a wide mystery why most startups prefer to headquarter in Bangalore. It made sense two decades ago but today there are several other Indian cities like Vizag, Nasik, Noida, Gurugram, Chandigarh, etc. which are more equipped, have better infrastructure and even lower cost of living. Still most folks prefer Bangalore just because it has been like that since ages and popularly called the "IT Hub". But logically, it doesn't make any sense at all!
It's a chicken & Egg problem. I run a startup in Pune, and we just don't get good developers here. We are open to remote, and most of the good candidates are in Bangalore.
Nobody in their right mind would ever setup an office in Delhi or adjacent regions. The office politics alone should deter half of the people. The rest is taken care of by the increased crime rate, pollution and attitude of people.
Vizag, Kochi, Pune, Chandigarh etc are all much better cities. In both the kind of people they attract as well as the overall quality of developers.
> As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day.
The 25-35 crowd are probably the worst employees that Twitter can ask for; too experienced to "keep their head down" and too young to suffer from ageism and be tied down with families. For companies like Google and Twitter that traditionally lean left and encourage employees to speak up, moving the company headquarters is probably the easiest way to filter out activist employees (since these days the company is making a hard pivot to a privately held conservative operating model).
MP and PA(not eastern) have a shortage. Santa Clara does not. It’s still pretty cheap to buy a house in SC compared to anywhere in the belt between San Mateo to Cupertino.
That seems reasonable - even if companies aren't moving based on where their employees are, employees are taking into account where the company is when they decide which jobs to take, and are probably more likely to leave a job if they find their commute too long.
They are moving to San Jose, which is a city. It may not be as cosmopolitan as SF (certainly not as compact) but the differences have narrowed some in the last decade or so. Not to mention that it has a larger population than SF.
I wonder if cheapish EVTOL travel might make a difference here. I.e. if CEOs effective travel time is reduced, does that affect headquarter location selection.
They seem unaware that a lot of SF based people go to the east bay.
But it's not inevitable that families move to suburbs either. Commenter is partly perpetuating a 1960s era "white flight" kind of stereotype, where cities are said to be terrible for families. I happen to have two kids in SF.
Additionally, a lot of what drives people out of SF specifically is the expense.
off topic: do you have a name or a link for the paper referenced? My company just moved to a new office that's "coincidentally" closer to the CEO's house, and I'd love to send it to him.
> if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that’s where Apple Park would be
A current example of this is Walmart which is in the midst of trying to force a huge number of employees to relocate to Bentonville, AR. I can see why someone would move to NYC or SF for a job, since there are plenty of other options for career development, but you have to be pretty committed to Walmart for life (undoubtedly their intention along with workforce reduction) to decide to move your entire family to Bentonville.
>Like if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that’s where Apple Park would be
What a dumb take. Tim Cook lives in California because Apple was founded there over 40 years ago. And Apple will stay in California because most of the talent Apple needs to succeed is already there. And since Apple will stay in California so will their CEO.
You must be on some really good shrooms to think Apple will uproot itself just to move to wherever Tim Cook would move.
Not relevant to any current actions by Twitter, but an interesting historical perspective is that it was very rare for a tech company to be in San Francisco.
Approximately all tech companies were in Silicon Valley proper (thus named) which is about (depending on who was drawing the boundaries) about 30-60 minutes south of San Francisco.
When Twitter opened in San Francisco I distinctly remember how weird it was to see a tech company up in SF. Then found it was due to tax breaks SF was creating for these companies and then lots more tech companies started showing up in SF.
When Twitter was launched, SF was overflowing with startups on every corner. In fact it was the second wave of SF startups, being a handful of years after the dot com crash.
The only thing even slightly surprising about Twitter's location was that they were way down in South Park instead of more solidly in South of Market. They moved to the Tenderloin building in 2012.
historically there was a lot of media and some internet in sf. more interesting hardware type tech companies generally clustered in the south bay with some exceptions (oqo, sega).
twitter was notable because they put a big campus in midmarket... but there was plenty of internet and multimedia that preceded them. (organic, macromedia, razorfish come to mind but there were countless others)
sure, no sun or apple, but let's be clear, twitter was no sun or apple either.
Had a recruiter call with Twitter a few months ago. Mandatory in office 5 days per week. Among other things, an hour commute both ways to work was not acceptable.
Maybe they will have better luck in Santa Clara.
I don’t buy any of the flamebait reasons for leaving SF. Reason 1 is money and reason 2 is talent pool.
I’ve had several meetings, either in Twitter office or around it, and the street scene is very bad in that part of SF. If the claim is that this is a motivation for the move, it certainly passes the sniff test for me.
I used live in the Tenderloin and work in the Twitter building. My walk to work required me to be mindful of both stationary and recently minted poop in transit. This was in 2019.
That’s fair, I never visited the office. But if that was the only issue maybe they’d consider a different part of SF, which would be easier for current employees.
So you've been able to gauge life and the street scene in SF based on several meetings? That's super interesting. I would argue the Embarcadero is fairly nice and I live here, but what do I know.
Have you been to Twitter's SF site? It is a weird place, between super sketchy and plainly empty, what is missing is the peace of mind, definitely a valid reason to leave. It has all the downsides from being in the downtown, while none of the perks remain in today's SF.
Talent pool isn't a real issue for Twitter now, under Elon, I don't think they truly prioritize Twitter over any of his other companies, the mission is to keep Twitter's lights on, that is it, the website/app had basically stayed the same after he took over, what talents do they really need, I don't buy it.
I think it’s inaccurate to say that they don’t need talent to keep the lights on at Twitter. Maybe not a lot of new architectural development is happening, but you definitely need a lot of ops people that know what they’re doing to keep the lights on there.
Santa Clara-San Jose area is relatively still damn expensive. (Ask me how I know.)
Anywhere with an RTO mandate is a hard pass. If they want to treat their employees like children and waste my time and money on pointless commuting to feel in-control, then count me out.
Yeah, this has been tested every which way by now, the entire point of in-person work is to monitor employees. My manager told me outright that the only reason I can stay remote is, unlike most of the team, I didn't seem to "disappear" during 2020.
reading this as a mariner who works 2-4 months straight, on a ship, in deep sea, 12 hour work day, and no days off (working saturday and sunday).. lol you dont know how bad it really is..
I'm going to assume your work requires your physical presence on that ship, in the deep sea, though. My work, however, does not. Further, employers are, on the whole, cheap, and want to pack workers into as small a footprint as possible. (Literally, 4' or less.) I can build a better work environment at home, for under $1k.
"My [unrelated] job is worse" is not a logical reason for me to abstain from advocating for better work conditions for myself, where there is a possibility of better work conditions. I can dislike things about one tech job vs. another tech job while still appreciating that the conditions of either job probably far exceed that of a career I wouldn't like.
(And, I would also still default to advocating for sane worker's rights in your industry too, unless there is some compelling reason that working >8h/d, 7d/wk makes some sort of sense in your industry.)
Talent pool is downstream of the "flamebait reasons" though. Maybe they're not moving out of SF directly because of the high crime etc., they're moving out of SF because they can't attract talent in SF... but that may well be at least partly because of the high crime etc..
I've lived in high crime areas, and SF doesn't have the kind of high crime that would actually deter me. The monotony of a homogeneous population is enough to keep me away from the Bay for as long as I can; and I know plenty of other talented people that feel the same
TBF, Elon has been running his other companies like he is running Twitter. Also, isn't it his prerogative to run his companies however he pleases as he is the CEO? If the shareholders are not happy with it, they can push him out.
It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes.
I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.
I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin.
As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office).
Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.
I’d be curious to know:
- how folks who work at X think about this move?
- how much remote work will be allowed?
- tax savings.
- lease savings.
I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.
> The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize mid-Market — and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local businesses — and it just ended up costing the city about $10 million a year in lost revenue.
> https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta...
I worked in mid-market/the TL from 2014 until 2017. The tech companies sort of helped. A handful of hip restaurants and bars sprung up, but the city never really dealt with the homeless. There are a lot of non-profits serving the homeless in the TL, and there wasn't really anywhere for them to go as an alternative.
I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my understanding that these are rarely worth it.
This assumes that the company would be based on the city regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.
during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away from the windows, as there was shooting outside.
About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks.
I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until the parent comment.
My first week working in a finance firm in midtown Manhattan there was a significant shooting. These things happen everywhere (edit: in the US) unfortunately. I'm not convinced that a more suburban location that forces people to drive would actually be any safer.
Visited SF in the mid 90s, then again about 10 years ago, and the decline was real back then. Tents on the same streets we'd walked as tourists 20 years earlier. I can say the same with Paris as well. New York, not so much, actually.
Living in London I don't notice the day to day differences here, but I would imagine others on here will say the same about London. It seems 'the West' has a general problem.
When I was at Spotify in the Warfield building, something similar happened, and we dropped behind the windows. Later that day, a can of pre-made Starbucks coffee someone left on their desk exploded from baking in the sun. Caused quite a scare.
I can't understand why anyone would willingly take a job at one of his companies (but especially Xitter) at this point just knowing what's publicly known... but it's also not difficult to find someone who has worked for him and can tell you what that experience was like.
> back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes
I always wonder what SF has done to deserve the added taxes? Did they keep the crime rate low? Did they keep improving the city's infra? Did they create a culture that people tolerate each other? Did they improve the quality of education? Did they improve the situation of the homeless community? Did they resolve the housing crisis?
Our forefathers fought for no representation no taxes. I don't know what representation I got in the city.
People want (wanted?) to live and work there, because not everyone wants to live in suburbia, and enough employers want (wanted?) to attract those people.
Before my employer made the adult decision to go remote only, it opened an SF office in additional to the peninsula one, because some people (like myself) wouldn’t commute to Palo Alto.
> Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.
This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at 313 Brandan next to South Park.
This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pretty fast, and the infrastructure improvements have made things faster and safer. I’m not really sure whom the bike is not a good fit for, so my expectation is commuters will catch up to this trend. More people will bike, resulting in vastly less toil, and better use of the city infrastructure overall.
Separately as a business owner, I’m not sure there is a generalizable strategy to office locations, even to tax avoidance. You want pretty smart people working for you, and smart people like spending 16 minutes on a journey instead of 50 minutes, and they can figure out how to do a lot of things more efficiently, and they’re going to all live together, and maybe that’s the value that locality in San Francisco provides: an aggregation of tradeoffs that people who apply themselves 100% to everything can enjoy.
> This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes...of course, I e-bike
The typical worker in SF doesn't bike to work. Only 3.4% of workers in SF biked
in 2012 [1] and 4.2% in 2018 [2]. Furthermore, e-bikes represented 4% of the US bike market in 2022 [3].
There is value in considering how a company's location impacts the vast majority of its employees.
Yeah, I’m not buying it either, I did a quick google map survey and it seems that commute times goes between 20-40 minutes between the Mission and South Park, depending on where in the Mission you start. In all cases biking is around 20 minutes.
Meanwhile only the trainride station to station between Menlo Park and SF is 45 minutes minimum (6 stops), assuming some commute time to the Menlo Park station and a 10 min walk after the train arrives, 50 min is cutting it short.
The commute from Mission gives you a variety of options, you could even walk it if you have the time (personally, I used rollerblades when I lived in the Mission and worked maybe half the way to South Park).
It was widely reported that Musk was moving X and SpaceX's offices to Texas due to a new LGBTQ+ reporting law for schools, which in turn was heralded as Yet Further Proof of California's demise.
Wonder if these SF targeted taxes contributed to the move. I think Musk was debating Benioff about the HGR recently, something about payment processing and gross receipts...
They've already cut about 80% of their workforce since Elon took over, I'm not sure how much more attrition they can take. Sure the site still mostly works in the technical sense, but the way it works now has led to a significant decline in revenue and active users.
I don't know what the established criteria are for 'reasonable commuting distance' in the SF Bay area, but seems like a big forced transfer like this might need a WARN act notice, which is going to get the company in the news for layoffs. And probably in the news for not providing the notice in a timely fashion, too.
This would be a bad look for a company that cared about how it looks.
It's an exciting move by X! They seem to adapt to the changing work environment. I wonder how this relocation will impact their company culture and operations in the long run.
I have him blocked but the CEO has 200 million followers. Even assuming 20% are real people, I'd imagine there's quite a few of those who'd love to work at his company.
The timeline is just crazy, but from a financial stance it makes sense to leave the more expensive location, if you already have the space else where (ignoring that they didn't pay their rent in San Francisco anyway).
I can understand why most wouldn't want to work at Twitter, sorry X, but if you're young with few obligations, I can see people doing it just for the experience of it, at least for a year or two. It has to be an insane ride to be on.
Folks with H1B visas have an undue burden on any attempt to move jobs. Also interviewing is hell for many tech folks who are extremely introverted (myself included in that last part.)
Very true although anyone on a H1B may have to file a bunch of paperwork since their job location changed. Although I suppose the paperwork is going to be more something that twitter's attorneys need to do.
That depends on how many X employees actually live in SF and how many commute each day back and forth from the same South Bay. When I worked in SF, I regularly shared a train with the latter crowd, and there are a lot of them. I'm not saying they all work for X, but I suspect for a lot of people there the move would actually be an improvement.
You realize Teams is pre-installed on like every windows machine, right? that's literally all you need for remote work. And most people agree that remote works is preferable/more more productive
You don't say that 2020-2022 proves that remote work definitely is ok for a lot of people and they want it to stay that way. And recently there have been multiple reports showing that more flexible working options help lowering attribution. Well, what a surprise. /s It is clear that CEOs force people back to office mostly to cut headcounts.
Since a gross receipts tax hits anything other than small, local stores inconsistently, I'm not sure what behavior it's trying to drive. It also taxes revenue rather than income, so yes, it makes anything ulta-low margin like a payments platform DOA.
For all the snark from people who dislike Elon, this is a bit of a sad ending. I remember when Twitter announced their presence in mid-market and the promises of how it would help the area. What people don't realize is that his will lead to real revenue losses for the city -- the largest companies in SF are overwhelmingly tech. Twitter is in the top 5 when it comes to how much tax they pay. Loss of revenue for the city will translate to cuts.
It doesn't matter, SF residents are so delusional and stockholmed i think they'll put up with literally anything. Even in this thread you have them acting like their city isn't a horrifying disaster to anyone not desensitized to it
My understanding is that that part of Market street never quite recovered from BART construction few decades back. That building was abandoned and was beautifully restored for Twitter HQ. I vividly remember it opening and then the neighborhood improving gradually. Sad for SF - the final blow to one of the few once optimistic and truly SF-based utopian social media companies…
Readit News
I realize this story is a cluster of divisive topics but that's why HN's guidelines say "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
Young adults love it bc they have the time to go to bars/restaurants/clubs
Middle aged folks hate it because they're so busy - they can't take advantage, and other people get in their way
(some) Older folks like it again bc they have the time to go to restaurants/theater
I'm sure that this will flip when I no longer have kids at home and have reached retirement.
Is it because their kids have grown up? I can imagine myself living in a city like Paris or NY if I don't have kids. I get to enjoy a bustling city without needing to dealing with the challenges of raising kids.
Just a note that this reversal could just as easily be specific to you and your circles.
In this thread all we have is two people who find anecdotally that some older people move to live near where they themselves live. Given how many people make some kind of change in retirement that's hardly surprising. We'd need actual data to come to any conclusion about large-scale trends.
Nowadays there's a bland sameness -- barely any music or other art much less much craziness. You can't imagine anything like the psychedelic scene appearing in SF much less Palo Alto these days, and most of what's left is in Oakland. Sigh.
I would say that San Francisco is quite nice now, great bones, although too expensive for interesting people to live.
Oakland music scene isn't particularly inspiring either. Definitely more independent music events in run down houses, but quality and inventiveness is too often of questionable value.
Go Slugs!
Boeing. That's what killed Boeing - moving HQ from the factory in Renton, WA to Chicago. Boeing has no plants anywhere near Chicago. But Dave Calhoun, the previous CEO lived in Chicago. He previously was the head of Nielsen, the TV ratings and marketing company, which has been in Chicago for a century.
It took far too long, but Calhoun is finally being eased out. Not fired outright, which would have been appropriate.
IME this is definitely true and it's often very intentional. One of the major reasons SF stole the startup scene from SV is that younger startup employees wanted to live in SF. As a startup founder you are very strongly incentivized to go where the talent is (or wants to be). When I was considering where to set up my startup a few months ago this was a huge consideration. Not quite at the level of HQ, but there's a reason Google has offices in both SF and South Bay as well, or in both SLU/SLU-area Seattle + across Lake Washington.
> If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF. I don't think it's about more vs less as much as matching the demographics of your typical employee. Eg experience levels, pay, work culture, personality, mix of job roles
I don't know where xAI's Palo Alto office is, but transit in the corporate Palo Alto office are generally good. If xAI is in the Stanford Research Park, you'll be taking a shuttle that runs only during commute times, and takes 15-30 minutes, depending on where exactly you get off.
Santana Row is more confusing. You'll travel either to Santa Clara or San Jose and take a bus. From Santa Clara, the bus is ~15 minutes. From San Jose, the bus is faster, but you've got a half- or one-mile walk.
Twit-er...X, isnt raking in cash like it used to. Musks changes like reinstating hate speech accounts and the blue check fiasco had a direct negative effect on advertising revenue and accelerated already downward subscriber trends. Leaning out the physical side of the already agile digital side was a good idea im not sure twitters old guard would have considered.
San Francisco has seen a talent exodus after the global pandemic. no senior SRE with 20 years of experience --whos also made to show up to the office five days a week-- is going to entertain San Francisco's traffic, crime, homelessness, or general congestion for even a minute.
Yes, you pay an SF premium. You pay a premium for most major cities, and the worse housing is, the higher the premium. But I'd bet moving to the South Bay isn't happening for that reason. SF pricing has a halo effect on the South Bay, and your savings will be minimal, if any. (I see little differences in South Bay and SF salaries, for larger companies)
What I'd wager precipitated the move is SF rents are stupidly high , and then you combine that with half the twitter offices being empty. If you believe loopt, San Jose office space is ~ half the cost of SF. Half the space, at half again cost - their real estate bill shrinks by 75%. And given that Twitters bill is likely ~$40M-50M/month, that's a good chunk of savings.
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The 25-35 crowd are probably the worst employees that Twitter can ask for; too experienced to "keep their head down" and too young to suffer from ageism and be tied down with families. For companies like Google and Twitter that traditionally lean left and encourage employees to speak up, moving the company headquarters is probably the easiest way to filter out activist employees (since these days the company is making a hard pivot to a privately held conservative operating model).
Suburbs on average have less crime. i wouldn't say that south bay is ideal but it's better than SF.
But it's not inevitable that families move to suburbs either. Commenter is partly perpetuating a 1960s era "white flight" kind of stereotype, where cities are said to be terrible for families. I happen to have two kids in SF.
Additionally, a lot of what drives people out of SF specifically is the expense.
Just saying, maybe south bay isn't SF, but it ain't idyllic peaceful suburbs either
Like if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that’s where Apple Park would be
So dumb
A current example of this is Walmart which is in the midst of trying to force a huge number of employees to relocate to Bentonville, AR. I can see why someone would move to NYC or SF for a job, since there are plenty of other options for career development, but you have to be pretty committed to Walmart for life (undoubtedly their intention along with workforce reduction) to decide to move your entire family to Bentonville.
What a dumb take. Tim Cook lives in California because Apple was founded there over 40 years ago. And Apple will stay in California because most of the talent Apple needs to succeed is already there. And since Apple will stay in California so will their CEO.
You must be on some really good shrooms to think Apple will uproot itself just to move to wherever Tim Cook would move.
Approximately all tech companies were in Silicon Valley proper (thus named) which is about (depending on who was drawing the boundaries) about 30-60 minutes south of San Francisco.
When Twitter opened in San Francisco I distinctly remember how weird it was to see a tech company up in SF. Then found it was due to tax breaks SF was creating for these companies and then lots more tech companies started showing up in SF.
When Twitter was launched, SF was overflowing with startups on every corner. In fact it was the second wave of SF startups, being a handful of years after the dot com crash.
The only thing even slightly surprising about Twitter's location was that they were way down in South Park instead of more solidly in South of Market. They moved to the Tenderloin building in 2012.
twitter was notable because they put a big campus in midmarket... but there was plenty of internet and multimedia that preceded them. (organic, macromedia, razorfish come to mind but there were countless others)
sure, no sun or apple, but let's be clear, twitter was no sun or apple either.
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Maybe they will have better luck in Santa Clara.
I don’t buy any of the flamebait reasons for leaving SF. Reason 1 is money and reason 2 is talent pool.
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Talent pool isn't a real issue for Twitter now, under Elon, I don't think they truly prioritize Twitter over any of his other companies, the mission is to keep Twitter's lights on, that is it, the website/app had basically stayed the same after he took over, what talents do they really need, I don't buy it.
Anywhere with an RTO mandate is a hard pass. If they want to treat their employees like children and waste my time and money on pointless commuting to feel in-control, then count me out.
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"My [unrelated] job is worse" is not a logical reason for me to abstain from advocating for better work conditions for myself, where there is a possibility of better work conditions. I can dislike things about one tech job vs. another tech job while still appreciating that the conditions of either job probably far exceed that of a career I wouldn't like.
(And, I would also still default to advocating for sane worker's rights in your industry too, unless there is some compelling reason that working >8h/d, 7d/wk makes some sort of sense in your industry.)
The first and only reason is whatever Musk felt like.
Twitter was imperically a terrible financial decision.
It seems like a bold statement to say the #1 is de facto money.
I suspect non-money issues are much higher on the list.
If anyone on the planet doesn't need more money, it's Musk.
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I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.
I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin.
As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office).
Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.
I’d be curious to know:
- how folks who work at X think about this move?
- how much remote work will be allowed?
- tax savings.
- lease savings.
I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.
Here's one summary of it as of last year:
> The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize mid-Market — and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local businesses — and it just ended up costing the city about $10 million a year in lost revenue. > https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta...
When the Twitter tax break expired in 2019, the Chronicle also did a pretty thorough survey of the mixed effects: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/
>> $10 million a year in lost revenue
That's 1.5% of the homeless budget.
Reminds me on this very interesting video on the subject focusing on Louisiana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38)
This assumes that the company would be based on the city regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.
About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks.
I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until the parent comment.
Like forcing them to drive to the office 2-5 days each week when they could continue working from home?
Living in London I don't notice the day to day differences here, but I would imagine others on here will say the same about London. It seems 'the West' has a general problem.
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I have and believe me it's kind of random and dependent on the mood.
The problem is that even if you are a 100x engineer the guy in the bad mood today may not know or care who you are.
I always wonder what SF has done to deserve the added taxes? Did they keep the crime rate low? Did they keep improving the city's infra? Did they create a culture that people tolerate each other? Did they improve the quality of education? Did they improve the situation of the homeless community? Did they resolve the housing crisis?
Our forefathers fought for no representation no taxes. I don't know what representation I got in the city.
Before my employer made the adult decision to go remote only, it opened an SF office in additional to the peninsula one, because some people (like myself) wouldn’t commute to Palo Alto.
This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at 313 Brandan next to South Park.
This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pretty fast, and the infrastructure improvements have made things faster and safer. I’m not really sure whom the bike is not a good fit for, so my expectation is commuters will catch up to this trend. More people will bike, resulting in vastly less toil, and better use of the city infrastructure overall.
Separately as a business owner, I’m not sure there is a generalizable strategy to office locations, even to tax avoidance. You want pretty smart people working for you, and smart people like spending 16 minutes on a journey instead of 50 minutes, and they can figure out how to do a lot of things more efficiently, and they’re going to all live together, and maybe that’s the value that locality in San Francisco provides: an aggregation of tradeoffs that people who apply themselves 100% to everything can enjoy.
The typical worker in SF doesn't bike to work. Only 3.4% of workers in SF biked in 2012 [1] and 4.2% in 2018 [2]. Furthermore, e-bikes represented 4% of the US bike market in 2022 [3].
There is value in considering how a company's location impacts the vast majority of its employees.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/archives/2014-pr/cb14-r09.ht....
[2] https://www.sfmta.com/blog/biking-numbers-san-franciscos-201...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1405949/electric-bicycle....
My estimates could be off by ~10 or so minutes it was a while ago.
Meanwhile only the trainride station to station between Menlo Park and SF is 45 minutes minimum (6 stops), assuming some commute time to the Menlo Park station and a 10 min walk after the train arrives, 50 min is cutting it short.
The commute from Mission gives you a variety of options, you could even walk it if you have the time (personally, I used rollerblades when I lived in the Mission and worked maybe half the way to South Park).
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/16/elon-musk-spacex-headquar...
Now we're hearing that he's moving X's offices to the South Bay Area. Go figure.
I don't have any special knowledge in this situation, I'm just drawing on my understanding of people.
Overpaid Executive Tax (OE)
https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/overpaid-executi...
Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax (HGR)
https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/homelessness-gro...
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This would be a bad look for a company that cared about how it looks.
Build cult, treat like cult members.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAY83HIL-Jg
I can understand why most wouldn't want to work at Twitter, sorry X, but if you're young with few obligations, I can see people doing it just for the experience of it, at least for a year or two. It has to be an insane ride to be on.
Or maybe I'm just thoroughly unlikable.
The building manager stopped any and all proceedings against X for the two months of alleged unpaid rent.
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You realize Teams is pre-installed on like every windows machine, right? that's literally all you need for remote work. And most people agree that remote works is preferable/more more productive
Effective remote work is as much, if not more, a social and collaboration problem, as it is a technological problem.
Twitter is planning to become a payments platform
Hopefully events like this contribute to speeding up the reform that the city needs.
Unfortunately the necessary austerity is going to cause more near-term pain, but hopefully results in some longer term prosperity for the city.