8 ms·

Most major tech companies want to hire onsite, when there are plenty of places in this country where you can buy a lot of real estate for much cheaper than the

Most major tech companies want to hire onsite, when there are plenty of places in this country where you can buy a lot of real estate for much cheaper than the Bay Area. I pay less on my mortgage for a large house with over an acre of land than friends of mine pay for rent for studio apartments in San Francisco or Seattle. Investing $1B into housing in the Bay Area seems nice at the surface, but maybe if we stopped demanding everyone be willing to relocate to one of a handful of cities to work in our industry, we'll solve the root cause of the problem.

davidw 7y ago
The 'root' cause is that industries tend to concentrate, and that's not an easy problem to solve. And at the same time there's a massive economic draw, California refuses to let the market provide anything like enough housing.
- CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
  Hire remote. Provide relocation assistance to get developers to move out of major cities, instead of the other way. Fringe benefit: Less payroll overhead since the cost of living in rural areas is much lower. > that's not an easy problem to solve. The solution is simple, it's just getting people to actually do it that's hard. > And at the same time there's a massive economic draw, California refuses to let the market provide anything like enough housing. I don't know enough about California's politics to provide insightful commentary, but from what I have heard, none of it was good or sane.
  - davidw 7y ago
    I've worked remote, and it's ok, but it's not the same thing as being in the office. It's not the same thing as having a bunch of local companies to choose from. Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers. And then there's stuff like high quality universities, and of course venture capital.
    - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      > It's not the same thing as having a bunch of local companies to choose from. What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions? > Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers. Same question for that perspective, except I do have a few ideas of a cynical answer to that question from the company's perspective.
      - filoleg 7y ago
        >What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions? The advantage is that on the path in-between now and the perfect future where all companies are remote-first( that we are not sure will ever happen), you will not be at a significant disadvantage when it comes to job prospects. I don't think that many people would be willing to heavily limit their job prospects (not even taking into account all the other advantages that come with living in a densely populated coastal city) while waiting for that "bright all-remote future" that may never come.
        CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
        As a short-term strategic move, sure. That's pragmatic. But given a ceteris paribus comparison of the two, my question is what is inherently superior about the onsite position over the remote position?
    - onemoresoop 7y ago
      How about remote offices or remote subdivisions? It always worked out, why wouldn't it work out now?
      - davidw 7y ago
        Remote offices seem like a good compromise once a company is big enough. There are still coordination issues though, I would imagine.
- manigandham 7y ago
  Why is it not easy? The internet is global just like the products these companies create. There's not much, if any, reason they need to be so consolidated in a single region or city.
  - dymk 7y ago
    Face-to-face communication has not been supplanted with online tools yet, and face-to-face communication is very important to this job.
    - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      > and face-to-face communication is very important to this job [citation needed] It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team.
      - dymk 7y ago
        > It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team. [citation needed] It's clearly important enough for Amazon, Facebook, and Google to invest heavily in already established tech hubs where it's incredibly expensive to build, so they can have their engineers working in the same physical location(s).
        CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
        Do I understand your argument correctly? Effectively, what I'm reading is, "Because large tech companies do X, it's very important for everyone else too (including billion-dollar companies that don't do X)."
        dymk 7y ago
        You're not understanding my argument correctly. I'm saying, in spite of it being cheaper to distribute their engineers and hire remote, they do not. These aren't companies run by incompetent people, and they're large enough to have some remote workforce, so they understand how remote workers compare to onsite with as few other variables changed. These companies hire onsite because it's important to be able to meet face-to-face. Emotion is particularly poorly conveyed over email or VC, and sometimes to convince somebody of something, meeting them in person is the best way to do that.
- falsedan 7y ago
  Software development isn't an industry like oil refining. Imagine if all the architects or civil engineers were located in a small handful of cities!
  - davidw 7y ago
    Architects and civil engineers mostly work where their services are needed, which makes sense. The economics of their industries are different.
    - falsedan 7y ago
      I don’t know what the point of this fact is. Architects and engineers mostly work from offices, which are usually located so that there is a good pool of potential employees around.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Oil workers go to where the oil is. Which is both concentrated and distributed. Software is dematerialised, which means, perversely, it tends to concentrate to a far greater extent. Much as local and regional entertainment, constrained by material proximiy to audience, gave way to Hollywood.
- erentz 7y ago
  People respond to this agglomeration factor with the argument we should “hire remote cuz the internet thing”. But the other factor to consider is how we are less tied by our jobs to physical location and that allows more choice in where people decide to live too. A lot of people want to live in the Bay Area and other coastal cities. They don’t want to live where housing is cheap in the Midwest. So you may have a liberating force in the way jobs have changed, but that works both ways. People are moving to the big coastal cities. The big coastal cities (and states) are doing a piss poor job of accommodating this - actually they’ve taken active measures to worsen the housing problem with zoning and tax rules. I would guess that google would get a lot more bang for its buck if it just outright bribed politicians with that $1 billion to enact policies that allowed constructing of more housing and better transit.
  - davidw 7y ago
    > I would guess that google would get a lot more bang for its buck if it just outright bribed politicians with that $1 billion to enact policies that allowed constructing of more housing and better transit. Hah - see my comment elsewhere. Local politicians are definitely the choke point that doesn't allow the market to function properly.
- xtracto 7y ago
  Given that "About 71 percent of tech employees in the Valley are foreign born," I think that if a group of FAANG+Friends agreed to open campuses in some other state at the same time, they could easily build a new tech community.
  - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
    If they can launch a global currency, they damn sure can build a tech community in a red state.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  California recently passed several laws to make it easier for the market to provide housing. However, local governments are still the ultimate deciders and many of them are opposed to new housing, such as in the SF Peninsula. Other parts of CA are less resistant to new housing. In LA's downtown, for example, almost 50,000 units of new housing are being brought online between 2016-2021. In both Korea Town and Hollywood, more than 5,000 new units have come online in the past 3 years (and they're already the densest neighborhoods). In Marina Del Rey and Playa Del Rey, roughly 2500 new units have opened/will open up in 2018 and 2019. Along the Metro Expo Line, more than 25,000 residential units within 4 blocks of a station are planned or already under construction. Inglewood will see somewhere between 500 and 2500 new apartments in the neighborhood around the Sofi Stadium, not including other residential development. Even Santa Monica will see roughly 2000 new apartments over the next 2 years. Edit: these are just the developments that I'm aware of. There are plenty more. If you're interested in following LA-area development, there are several Facebook groups devoted to this subject.
GuiA 7y ago
> I pay less on my mortgage for a large house with over an acre of land than friends of mine pay for rent for studio apartments in San Francisco or Seattle. That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company. The large house with an acre of land gives you other opportunities, but if that one specific dimension is what you care about then it falls short.
- CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
  > That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company. ...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord. If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay, it'd remove the financial incentive to move to these cities. This would have a lot of immediate obvious benefits.
  - twblalock 7y ago
    > If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay Why would they do that? They only pay as much as they do in Silicon Valley to offset the cost of living.
    - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      I said comparable, not equivalent. Cost of Living Adjustments can be included in their offer calculus.
    - BurningFrog 7y ago
      No, they pay what they need to pay to get the hire.
  - bluedino 7y ago
    $2,000 house payment vs a $3,000 apartment rental is only $12,000 a year in difference.
    - 7y ago
lowdose 7y ago
We read a lot about the SF real estate market, wonder if it would be possible to dredge up a couple of Islands like the palm island in Dubai.
- kansface 7y ago
  Houses literally built on sand next to the fault?
- Retra 7y ago
  Those islands are wasteful, expensive, frivolous, and ecologically disastrous. They are not something to take pride in or repeat.
- smileysteve 7y ago
  It's worth noting that San Francisco is already a large portion of landfill.
malcolmgreaves 7y ago
Many people want to live in deaireable areas. There's a reason why your home is cheap.
- CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
  > There's a reason why your home is cheap. https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2017/03/09/naples-happiest-healthiest-city-america/21877229/ https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2017/03/09/naples-happ... Swing and a miss. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples,_Florida > Naples is one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, with the sixth-highest per capita income in the country in 2012, and the second-highest proportion of millionaires per capita in the US. In short, your passive aggressive quip doesn't match reality.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - sfotm 7y ago
    Being the happiest and healthiest city doesn't really affect what's counted as desirable or valuable in the housing market. This doesn't really follow.
  - codemac 7y ago
    You know those are paid for and marketed by your local city's real estate industry, right?
  - keerthiko 7y ago
    People are happy and healthy in a place for all kinds of reasons. That doesn't make them a desirable settlement destination for others. Maybe a town is incredibly racist and who lives there is all from the same longstanding community and they are all extremely close and have good personal relationships with each other and feel a strong sense of belonging to the place and the people. Maybe the town is perfectly suited to being students, young and single and there's a lot of things that cater to them. Maybe the town is better suited to families, couples, people who own dogs. Such people will gravitate there. This could mean they are all happy and healthy, but it would not mean that if I, some random bloke from a different state/culture/language/country moved there and tried to settle in and live my life, I would be particularly happy or healthy. So yes, a place can be the happiest place in the world for the people who already live there, and still be undesirable for the "looking for a nice place to settle" population at large. However, having a highly employable, high income industry, lots of motivated hard workers, a vibrant art scene, and good weather makes a place a lot more universally desirable, and it takes a helluva lot of negatives to offset that desirability (which the bay area is trying really hard to do).

davidw 7y ago

The 'root' cause is that industries tend to concentrate, and that's not an easy problem to solve. And at the same time there's a massive economic draw, California refuses to let the market provide anything like enough housing.

CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
Hire remote. Provide relocation assistance to get developers to move out of major cities, instead of the other way. Fringe benefit: Less payroll overhead since the cost of living in rural areas is much lower. > that's not an easy problem to solve. The solution is simple, it's just getting people to actually do it that's hard. > And at the same time there's a massive economic draw, California refuses to let the market provide anything like enough housing. I don't know enough about California's politics to provide insightful commentary, but from what I have heard, none of it was good or sane.
- davidw 7y ago
  I've worked remote, and it's ok, but it's not the same thing as being in the office. It's not the same thing as having a bunch of local companies to choose from. Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers. And then there's stuff like high quality universities, and of course venture capital.
  - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
    > It's not the same thing as having a bunch of local companies to choose from. What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions? > Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers. Same question for that perspective, except I do have a few ideas of a cynical answer to that question from the company's perspective.
    - filoleg 7y ago
      >What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions? The advantage is that on the path in-between now and the perfect future where all companies are remote-first( that we are not sure will ever happen), you will not be at a significant disadvantage when it comes to job prospects. I don't think that many people would be willing to heavily limit their job prospects (not even taking into account all the other advantages that come with living in a densely populated coastal city) while waiting for that "bright all-remote future" that may never come.
      - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
        As a short-term strategic move, sure. That's pragmatic. But given a ceteris paribus comparison of the two, my question is what is inherently superior about the onsite position over the remote position?
  - onemoresoop 7y ago
    How about remote offices or remote subdivisions? It always worked out, why wouldn't it work out now?
    - davidw 7y ago
      Remote offices seem like a good compromise once a company is big enough. There are still coordination issues though, I would imagine.
manigandham 7y ago
Why is it not easy? The internet is global just like the products these companies create. There's not much, if any, reason they need to be so consolidated in a single region or city.
- dymk 7y ago
  Face-to-face communication has not been supplanted with online tools yet, and face-to-face communication is very important to this job.
  - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
    > and face-to-face communication is very important to this job [citation needed] It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team.
    - dymk 7y ago
      > It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team. [citation needed] It's clearly important enough for Amazon, Facebook, and Google to invest heavily in already established tech hubs where it's incredibly expensive to build, so they can have their engineers working in the same physical location(s).
      - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
        Do I understand your argument correctly? Effectively, what I'm reading is, "Because large tech companies do X, it's very important for everyone else too (including billion-dollar companies that don't do X)."
        dymk 7y ago
        You're not understanding my argument correctly. I'm saying, in spite of it being cheaper to distribute their engineers and hire remote, they do not. These aren't companies run by incompetent people, and they're large enough to have some remote workforce, so they understand how remote workers compare to onsite with as few other variables changed. These companies hire onsite because it's important to be able to meet face-to-face. Emotion is particularly poorly conveyed over email or VC, and sometimes to convince somebody of something, meeting them in person is the best way to do that.
falsedan 7y ago
Software development isn't an industry like oil refining. Imagine if all the architects or civil engineers were located in a small handful of cities!
- davidw 7y ago
  Architects and civil engineers mostly work where their services are needed, which makes sense. The economics of their industries are different.
  - falsedan 7y ago
    I don’t know what the point of this fact is. Architects and engineers mostly work from offices, which are usually located so that there is a good pool of potential employees around.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Oil workers go to where the oil is. Which is both concentrated and distributed. Software is dematerialised, which means, perversely, it tends to concentrate to a far greater extent. Much as local and regional entertainment, constrained by material proximiy to audience, gave way to Hollywood.
erentz 7y ago
People respond to this agglomeration factor with the argument we should “hire remote cuz the internet thing”. But the other factor to consider is how we are less tied by our jobs to physical location and that allows more choice in where people decide to live too. A lot of people want to live in the Bay Area and other coastal cities. They don’t want to live where housing is cheap in the Midwest. So you may have a liberating force in the way jobs have changed, but that works both ways. People are moving to the big coastal cities. The big coastal cities (and states) are doing a piss poor job of accommodating this - actually they’ve taken active measures to worsen the housing problem with zoning and tax rules. I would guess that google would get a lot more bang for its buck if it just outright bribed politicians with that $1 billion to enact policies that allowed constructing of more housing and better transit.
- davidw 7y ago
  > I would guess that google would get a lot more bang for its buck if it just outright bribed politicians with that $1 billion to enact policies that allowed constructing of more housing and better transit. Hah - see my comment elsewhere. Local politicians are definitely the choke point that doesn't allow the market to function properly.
xtracto 7y ago
Given that "About 71 percent of tech employees in the Valley are foreign born," I think that if a group of FAANG+Friends agreed to open campuses in some other state at the same time, they could easily build a new tech community.
- CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
  If they can launch a global currency, they damn sure can build a tech community in a red state.
gamblor956 7y ago
California recently passed several laws to make it easier for the market to provide housing. However, local governments are still the ultimate deciders and many of them are opposed to new housing, such as in the SF Peninsula. Other parts of CA are less resistant to new housing. In LA's downtown, for example, almost 50,000 units of new housing are being brought online between 2016-2021. In both Korea Town and Hollywood, more than 5,000 new units have come online in the past 3 years (and they're already the densest neighborhoods). In Marina Del Rey and Playa Del Rey, roughly 2500 new units have opened/will open up in 2018 and 2019. Along the Metro Expo Line, more than 25,000 residential units within 4 blocks of a station are planned or already under construction. Inglewood will see somewhere between 500 and 2500 new apartments in the neighborhood around the Sofi Stadium, not including other residential development. Even Santa Monica will see roughly 2000 new apartments over the next 2 years. Edit: these are just the developments that I'm aware of. There are plenty more. If you're interested in following LA-area development, there are several Facebook groups devoted to this subject.

GuiA 7y ago

> I pay less on my mortgage for a large house with over an acre of land than friends of mine pay for rent for studio apartments in San Francisco or Seattle. That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company. The large house with an acre of land gives you other opportunities, but if that one specific dimension is what you care about then it falls short.

CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
> That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company. ...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord. If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay, it'd remove the financial incentive to move to these cities. This would have a lot of immediate obvious benefits.
- twblalock 7y ago
  > If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay Why would they do that? They only pay as much as they do in Silicon Valley to offset the cost of living.
  - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
    I said comparable, not equivalent. Cost of Living Adjustments can be included in their offer calculus.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    No, they pay what they need to pay to get the hire.
- bluedino 7y ago
  $2,000 house payment vs a $3,000 apartment rental is only $12,000 a year in difference.
  - 7y ago

lowdose 7y ago

We read a lot about the SF real estate market, wonder if it would be possible to dredge up a couple of Islands like the palm island in Dubai.

kansface 7y ago
Houses literally built on sand next to the fault?
Retra 7y ago
Those islands are wasteful, expensive, frivolous, and ecologically disastrous. They are not something to take pride in or repeat.
smileysteve 7y ago
It's worth noting that San Francisco is already a large portion of landfill.

malcolmgreaves 7y ago

Many people want to live in deaireable areas. There's a reason why your home is cheap.

CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
> There's a reason why your home is cheap. https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2017/03/09/naples-happiest-healthiest-city-america/21877229/ https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2017/03/09/naples-happ... Swing and a miss. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples,_Florida > Naples is one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, with the sixth-highest per capita income in the country in 2012, and the second-highest proportion of millionaires per capita in the US. In short, your passive aggressive quip doesn't match reality.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sfotm 7y ago
  Being the happiest and healthiest city doesn't really affect what's counted as desirable or valuable in the housing market. This doesn't really follow.
- codemac 7y ago
  You know those are paid for and marketed by your local city's real estate industry, right?
- keerthiko 7y ago
  People are happy and healthy in a place for all kinds of reasons. That doesn't make them a desirable settlement destination for others. Maybe a town is incredibly racist and who lives there is all from the same longstanding community and they are all extremely close and have good personal relationships with each other and feel a strong sense of belonging to the place and the people. Maybe the town is perfectly suited to being students, young and single and there's a lot of things that cater to them. Maybe the town is better suited to families, couples, people who own dogs. Such people will gravitate there. This could mean they are all happy and healthy, but it would not mean that if I, some random bloke from a different state/culture/language/country moved there and tried to settle in and live my life, I would be particularly happy or healthy. So yes, a place can be the happiest place in the world for the people who already live there, and still be undesirable for the "looking for a nice place to settle" population at large. However, having a highly employable, high income industry, lots of motivated hard workers, a vibrant art scene, and good weather makes a place a lot more universally desirable, and it takes a helluva lot of negatives to offset that desirability (which the bay area is trying really hard to do).