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> The only solution is changing the zoning laws Or these companies can move. If you take successful STEM related businesses and move them to better area's the

• djakjxnanjak 7y ago
  No way, no how is Google or any other decent employer going to uproot all their knowledge workers and make them unproductive for the foreseeable future by forcing them to move to another region. The diaspora from the Bay Area will keep happening the way it has been: at the economic margins. Over time, people outside of tech who aren’t subsidized by prop 13 or rent control will get priced out. There will be a perpetual underclass living in trailers and garages, and the landed aristocracy will be further entrenched.
  • PaulHoule 7y ago
    It's an interesting question. How much less productive would these workers be if they were moved to Salt Lake City or Henderson, NV or Syracuse, NY? If you lost 20% of the productivity but could pay 30% less that would be OK, wouldn't it?
    • rhinoceraptor 7y ago
      In the long run they'd be as productive (or more, since the commute would likely be better). The problem is it would take months or years to move, and a lot of people don't want to or can't move, so they'd quit and find a new job almost instantly.
      • erik_seaberg 7y ago
        The fact that they can find a new job almost instantly is why they came here in the first place. It would take many competing employers showing up to make another labor market similarly appealing. You'd have to pay me a lot to move to the middle of nowhere, because not only am I not excited about living there, I'm still better off moving back here for the next job.
    • TulliusCicero 7y ago
      It's moot because they'd lose so many employees immediately that it'd be economic suicide. Google can't instantly conjure 5,000 more high quality engineers out of nowhere in SLC. The most you'll see is something like what Amazon (sort of) tried with creating a "second HQ".
    • ghaff 7y ago
      For starters, lots of them just wouldn't move. When companies move headquarters or other large facilities they usually expect to lose lots of people even if they cover relocation and actively try to hold onto people. (Which may, of course, not be the case if the company actually wants to lay off people.) None of this is to argue that big tech companies shouldn't be more distributed. They probably should and it's happening to some degree naturally as they grow. But trying to move already employed people wholesale to a new city, especially one that many will see as relatively unattractive, will cost you a significant percentage of your workforce.
    • malnourish 7y ago
      In addition to what others have said, you have to consider what your competitors might do while you're spinning up. They could capitalize on your downtime.
      • jonas21 7y ago
        And to top it all off, those competitors would have the pick of your (former) employees who didn't want to move.
  • s3r3nity 7y ago
    I want to agree that the labor market will correct at some point, but to your point, it's only at the margins for now, and is way too slow to adjust. There are too many people who feel like they _have_ to live there (or NYC / insert overly populated city here) to have a career, that any sort of correction will take decades.
    • epistasis 7y ago
      If more people want to live in an area, why should we stop them? What good comes from denying people that opportunity? I'm asking this to find out your definition of overpopulation. Because the people that want to move here don't think that's the case, and I certainly don't think that's the case given how low population density is throughout the Bay Area. And since high density walkable neighborhoods are healthier for people and the environment than car dependent sprawl, I think that we are actually underpopulated.
  • caymanjim 7y ago
    Google doesn't need to move. They just need to expand elsewhere. Amazon is opening HQ2 because Seattle is "full", and there are lots of smart people elsewhere that they could employ. All the FAANGs should spread out more.
    • novok 7y ago
      Very NIMBY of you. They just have to be not in my back yard and go away somewhere else. "No more immigrants in mountain view!" As far as expand elsewhere goes, google has many staff in many countries and cities all over the world.
      • caymanjim 7y ago
        I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. If you'll scroll to the top of the comments on this page, you'll see where I stated the case that NIMBYism is the problem with housing there, and specifically that Mountain View's resistance to denser housing is part of it. I also think that Google and other large companies can expand elsewhere to alleviate some of the housing pressure, as Amazon has already started doing. Google has offices everywhere, but they are tiny compared to HQ.
      • BubRoss 7y ago
        That's not at all what he said. He was talking about the company confronting high cost of living near their headquarters.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    Why would “knowledge workers” be unproductive in another region?
    • djakjxnanjak 7y ago
      It’s not being in another region that’s the problem, it’s moving. People tend to find forced moves traumatic and will go to great lengths to avoid them.
  • ProAm 7y ago
    You dont have to uproot, just stop hiring in CA, and start hiring at other newer locations. They already have offices all over the world.
• ch4s3 7y ago
  Move them where? Is there some mystical place somewhere in the US that has laws amenable to running a tech business, decent weather, good universities, infrastructure (roads, fiber, transit, etc.), and is agreeable to at least another company so you can get some agglomeration effects? And then how do you convince tens of thousands of employees to move? How do you no just end up with the same problems, or crazy sprawl like Houston which has its own problems?
  • hindsightbias 7y ago
    Where did IBM, HP, DEC, Dell, etc build back in the day? For IBM, it was the boonies of Austin, SJ, Boulder, Rochester, Burlington, Poughkeepsie, Hursley, Toronto, Somers, White Plains... companies, services and people moved to them. Do FAANGs have no gravitas? They can’t do better? Yes, in 20 years, you end up with sprawl, but thats better than crashing someone elses hood and wanting it to morph into Manhattan.
    • erik_seaberg 7y ago
      There are people who spent their entire career at IBM. If you're willing and able to do that, it doesn't matter so much how many competing employers are nearby. But when today's tenures are under two years, you're going to need to land twenty jobs, not just one.
      • hindsightbias 7y ago
        People in the military move every three years. I know many who were at HP or IBM and worked at 4 or 5 sites, not settling until their kids were in HS or near retirement. These people probably arent getting fired. They’re flighty, pursuing to dollar, self-actualization, doing good, whatever. Which is perfectly fine and reasonable until they all want to live in the same handful of zipcodes. I just dont understand why society needs to accomodate that anymore than why Jackson Hole should accomadate my need for a $250k 2-bdr condo with ski-out.
      • slavapestov 7y ago
        I can certainly understand spending less than two years at a job if things don't work out. But jumping from job to job with an average tenure of under two years? It's not really enough time to learn the technology and build relationships in the company. What the hell are these people actually doing?
• chaostheory 7y ago
  They don't need to move. If more companies accepted more remote positions, it would lessen the need for everyone to mass in certain locations. Everything would be slightly more distributed instead of overly centralized.
• TulliusCicero 7y ago
  Companies aren't going to move HQ's, because that's a terrible idea. The knowledge and skills loss would take years and years to recover from, substantially impeding productivity for a long time. It's economic suicide for a company like Google. What you're not bothering to grapple with is: why are these companies trying to expand headcount in areas that are somewhat hostile to them, and also much more expensive? Hell, even in Europe, Google's big offices are in the most expensive cities. There's a reason for that, and it's not because they enjoy lighting money on fire. Once you've figured out the 'why' there, you can work on coming up with a fix or workaround. Until then, just blithely saying "well they're just too lazy to do this other thing" itself just smacks of intellectual laziness. It lets you slam them without having to analyze the very real issues keeping companies in expensive tech hubs.
  • linuxftw 7y ago
    Having an HQ seems increasingly antiquated. Sure, there probably needs to be a designated executive center, but otherwise it seems far less risky to partition your organization into smaller units. Just look at what Amazon is doing with HQ2.
    • TulliusCicero 7y ago
      Even with Amazon, it was "HQ2", not "HQ50". And big companies already do have lots of engineering offices, it's just still beneficial to have a big main hub, there are costs to fragmentation.
• dang 7y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20215644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20215644.