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Comment by _kava | Hacker News Reader

I understand this is HN and many here love SF so can you explain to me how or why a company would want to have a physical location in downtown SF? It is expensive, higher tax, more regulations, all of which are often hated by a pure capitalist corporation. With the remote work push, the argument about talent pool is moot as well.

IMO, moving out of SF is the correct choice. In fact, moving out of CA is also a correct choice, if profit is all a company is looking for.

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SF offices are a leftover of the low interest rate cycle. It's ok when you can borrow money cheaply as a form of status symbol for your company, but it makes no sense when companies have to watch every dollar and actually turn a profit - especially with the growth of remote work.

I expect that companies will maintain bay area offices for investor relations and small teams of the absolute top talent, but do most hiring elsewhere over the years.

Twitter received a sweetheart deal from the city to move there

https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/city/

Not sure it was worth it in the long run, but there was a lot of benefits that normal companies didn't receive.

>With the remote work push, the argument about talent pool is moot as well.

Isn't Elon massively anti-remote?

Not only Elon Musk. Lots of companies are backtracking on full remote work. Statu quo seems to be hybrid work for many big companies.

And I’ll just preemptively jump in and nip this in the bud before some HNer writes their anti-RTO manifesto in the replies:

Not all organisations or executives have a vested interest in commercial real estate. Especially this late in the game when plenty of orgs have had an opportunity to let their leases expire.

Not all RTO action is due to some perverted desire by incompetent managers to see subordinate butts in seats, either.

There is a sizeable contingent of leadership that legitimately sees in-person work as the best means of eliciting productivity from their staff, and are willing to trade off taking a hit from some staff not being happy about this, and potentially leaving. You might not agree with the strategy. You might strongly feel that it’s wrong. But the reality is that they believe it.

Furthermore there is certainly a sizeable contingent of staff that would prefer a hybrid role to full WFH. I’m not talking about faceless sales leadership extroverts as techies often put it. I’m talking about ICs. I’m talking about developers.

And there are certainly, certainly people that just don’t feel as strongly about it as a lot of the people here.

I’d love for just one WFH-related thread to not devolve into faux-intelligent basically-xeroxed screeds about commercial real estate and dumb management.

I've recently gone full time remote - mainly to be closer to family - and all I can say is thank goodness I'm near the end of my career. I vastly prefer hybrid - being in the office for a couple of days at least allows for networking, face time and serendipitous opportunities. There is no way I would be where I am today if I had always been working full time remote. I simply would not have had the opportunities to cross paths with people.

> Statu quo seems to be hybrid work for many big companies.

That’s the status quo until they rescind that as well. The companies who transitioned to hybrid early have been ending it since mid-late 2023 and the efforts have only ramped up in 2024.

Hybrid is a great way to cripple remote work too: remote work requires good communication hygiene in the company, hybrid makes that falter by reinstating the old direct back-channels, now you can degrade systematic communications and hobble remote workers, then justify RTO on those grounds.

And then remote work and quality of life is back to being a perk of upper management, “as it should be”.

And yet just today I read an article about how more than half of tech CEOs now are allowing workers to work fully remote if the choose, which is up from closer to 35% a year ago. It’s possible some of the RTO push was to get people to leave, or that management, underestimated how unpopular it would be with employees, or perhaps the simplest explanation: management is mostly a cargo cult just throwing spaghetti at the wall, with no real rhyme or reason behind their decision making.

It is an attractive location for young people that want to live in SF instead of the boring burbs. Downtown has a ton of food options for lunch. You can walk over to a Giants game or to the waterfront. Union Square in particular has turned into something of a trash heap, but FiDi to the north and SOMA to the south are (mostly) attractive.

It is easily accessible for anyone on BART or Muni lines so you may not need to own a car.

Outside of that, it's still a flex to have a downtown SF office. This isn't just for warm feelings, it can affect fundraising and talent attraction.

And currently, office prices are super low in SF. My company is paying about 1/5th of the price (literally) for the top floor of a building compared to a company that rents the floor below them (which signed a 5 year lease in 2019).

There are a lot of very readily apparent reasons you are apparently ignoring as to why your company got a much lower rent rate than someone who signed in 2019. Seriously - the ability for people to ignore multiple, rather large elephants in the room is hilarious.

Moving out of SF may be the correct choice, but most engineers I know who have moved out of CA to cheaper cost of living areas have regretted their decision for one reason or another. Better taxes on paper may not translate to a better talent pool.

The benefit of locating to e.g. SF or New York is probably mostly social, to the capitalist and ruling class.

I think you want to be close to the top of the pyramid.

A CTO I worked for at a small startup said that they "don't go far from their golf club". But since Bill Gates and Steve Jeversson turned up I guess it is about being where it happens rather than being litteraly by their golf club.

Musk seems to want the remaining Twitter employees to be in the office, and San Jose fits the lifestyle profile of those remaining much better than San Francisco does.

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