When I moved to Santa Cruz (at the end of the nineties), my company eventually closed our office there and consolidated everyone into our office in downtown San Jose. No one wanted to work there, which I found weird at first (considering it wasn't very far away), but eventually understood.
San Jose was pretty shitty then (I have no idea what it's like now, but it sounds like it's basically the same).
I also didn't find anything redeeming about San Francisco (which I realize is a minority opinion), so I stayed in Santa Cruz as long as I could (before eventually relocating to DC after the company closed the rest of our offices out west).
That's because SF is unarguably a complete shithole (like literally, as in there is human feces on every street). There is a reason I refuse unequivocally to ever take a job that requires me to live in the Bay Area. Remote work isn't just good for your startup's office rent, it's good for worker health, diversity of experience and regional cultures, and helps your workers live in places that don't suck. Bringing everyone to SF is unnecessarily expensive and that city is awful.
I was watching a DJ from West Oakland on Twitch, and she was very excited that she was moving to SF next week. She said that because all the tech people left, rents in SF have fallen a lot, so much so that she's actually saving money moving to SF.
It'll be interesting to see how that holds up after this is over. How many of the large employers will continue to allow work from home, or at least not work from SF?
I agree wholeheartedly. I first moved to San Francisco in 1998 for reasons unrelated to tech, and despite becoming a software engineer I cheered the effect the dotcom crash had on the city. The people who made the city great were being forced out and replaced by young tech workers who largely didn't care about anything other than their careers.
The app boom was similarly heartbreaking, only this time most tech workers didn't even need to explore the neighborhoods they lived in -- they could Uber to the front door of any restaurant they wanted, and take tech buses instead of riding their bikes or taking public transportation to get to work.
A few years ago I read that the average tenure of a business on Valencia was less than 18 months, which is nothing short of a death sentence for a neighborhood like the Mission. Long times residents no long feel connected to (or were able to take pride in) their neighborhood, and most new residents don't care to to establish those connections -- why bother if the upscale boutique that replaced a multigenerationally owned family business is just going to be gone in a year an a half?
I mourn what happened to the city I used to love, but I'm optimistic that the decentralization of tech will leave San Francisco a better place.
One of the reasons SF grew as a tech hub was that large tech companies had so many employees living there and commuting to the valley because they preferred the urban lifestyle/environment to the suburbia of the Peninsula and South Bay. Eventually it became a competitive advantage to start up in SF (easier to hire young employees) or open a branch office there (retain employees). I work in SF in tech and many of my coworkers told me that exact story, because they were the ones living it.
Anecdotally, during remote work, I’ve seen a lot of younger people who aren’t on visas go live wherever/not move to SF for their jobs even if their team is in SF, while the established SF residents with houses and families stayed, as they did in the South Bay. The difference is that people who worked in the South Bay but hated it were never living there and instead in SF, so it hasn’t hollowed out as much as SF, which was more of a choice. Also from what I’ve seen, immigrants from India/China preferred to live in the South Bay anyway.
SF is great and I think it’s inevitable that it will see a resurgence. My guess is that young people at some point, being inherently contrarian, will eventually start rejecting remote work and want to live the lavish tech office lifestyle with other 20-something’s again. Likely the 2010s Google/Facebook experiences will be viewed with nostalgia and young people will try to recreate it in their new companies - it already almost doesn’t exist anymore since major company offices are sparsely attended and have had all the perks slowly cut back.
Its still a good place to build your career and connections. Im older now and am remote (go onsite in SF 4 weeks a year), but regret not doing it when i was younger. It still has a lot of tech folks, a lot of tech money, networking opportunities, and tons of vibrant pockets. It's definitely grimy. But i walk to work and back each day Im here and see hundreds of others doing the same. There are literally always groups of workers or friends at bars and restaurants as i walk around in the evening. You can tell the city is partially hollowed out but it feels quite a long way from dead to me.
I have kids now, and affordance aside the family opportunities here are sparse. So for me the time has passed. But I think anyone building their career in tech should at least consider a temporary stint in SF, or perhaps somewhere similarly tech dense (NY? Seattle?).
I don’t see what SF has to do with anything? SF has made a number of incredibly poor anti-tech decisions that have pushed tech companies out of town. They kicked out Square, Stripe and PayPal (and I assume a myriad other payments companies, probably Airbnb) with Prop C. Of course people are leaving. Their jobs moved.
I wouldn’t confuse a particularly poorly managed city for a broader trend. The same is certainly not happening a few towns over in South San Francisco where Stripe is now located, or in Cupertino, or in Menlo Park. Or at Tesla. Or every financial business in New York. Anecdotally every early stage startup I know is starting in person.
Couple years from now, work from home will once again be the exception.
I moved out of the bay in '06. Been working remote for bay companies ever since. Live in a huge house less than 1000ft from the ocean that is cheaper than a studio anywhere in the bay.
From a corporate survival standpoint it's retarded to put all of your servers in redundant data centers spread all over the world but put all of you employees in one city that is likely to be uninhabitable soon.
Yup. Couldn't read much of the article, but this is me.
I was in SF because employers demanded it, because investors demanded it. Now my company is not only allowing Bay Area employees to leave the state, but hiring remotely. Hell yeah, I'm gone.
I've been here since the 90s as well, and I can't think of a single major company that came out of SF until recently. Not enough to cause a huge shift in where people worked.
People will be back. SF has more than just offices for tech companies.
I've lived here since 1996. I've seen the ebbs and flows of traffic/vacancy rates. There was an exodus in 2001 and another one in 2008. But the people always come back.
given how much the locals hate techies, the migration couldn't happen soon enough. I haven't been in SF in 4 years and its been great. I made valuable contacts but beyond that, there isn't much SF offers now that remote work is becoming mainstream
A symptom of the sickness, IMO, and another example of the tech boom failing to hit anyone except techies.
Our success and our wealth is failing to float all boats, or even any boats that aren't our own. Instead of tech worker demand driving infrastructure, it has simply created a separate (but equal?), exclusive, mirror transit system.
Also an example of complete and utter urban planning failing on the part of the city of San Francisco. A large part of why companies don't set up shop in SF proper (despite the bulk of their work force wanting to live there), is due to the complete lack of development. Rents, both commercial and residential, are completely out of control and it actively drives away business. Meanwhile SF has completely crossed off new development in large swathes of the city - including pretty much the entire downtown commercial core.
SF is a vibrant, innovative, creative population subsisting on the surface of a government that is firmly hanging onto antiquated notions of the 19th century, not even the 20th, and this conflict has reached epic proportions of ridiculousness. Everywhere you go find vibrant pockets of activity, but you can't shake the feeling that you're walking in a museum, instead of a evolving, changing, adapting city.
They are in the other cities, but it's a network effect. The most interesting jobs are in SF, so they move to SF, so when people make new interesting jobs they do it in SF because all the people are in SF.
As I said, I hope this trend reverses as more people accept remote work as a good way to do business. But until then, it is what it is.
This time it is different. People really are doing their jobs without ever visiting the office. They may not readily shift back.
As for San Francisco, some would argue that the "end of San Francisco" already occurred because of the tech industry. People are obsessed with the idea that tech will leave town because they preferred the way it was before.
I personally don't see this happening in San Francisco, at least not with top-tier companies. The only workers I've seen leaving SF have moved to NYC for adventure, or moved back to China.
Though there was mostly never a need to live in SF for a lot of the tech company jobs. Many/most were people who wanted to live in a city in the Bay Area even if their jobs were in the South Bay. I assume it's an exodus from the Bay Area generally.
They pulled eminent domain no us to put up the new transbay terminal and infrastructure down town.
We tried to find a decent replacement but couldn't. Eventually we gave up working and converted the entire company to remote work.
Everyone preferred working from home. Some even bailed (like myself) and left SF. Some even went to Europe.
SF is dead.. it's bittersweet like you said of course... but it's died and has been reborn many times.
At least I don't have to smell shit and piss on the walk to work every day.
reply