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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> infrastructure improvements
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...
This would be a bad look for a company that cared about how it looks.
Build cult, treat like cult members.
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.
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.
Where do folks actually live in those areas? Is it that a 30min drive north to San Fran becomes a 30min drive south to San Jose?
Living in SF and working in South Bay sucked for me, when I did that, for that reason in particular.
I would guess a large portion of the individuals in the SF office would live within SF/East bay and have a fairly reasonable commute going to the SF office. I am not sure how far Bart goes south now but typically you would take Caltrain so thats a 45min ride from SF to Palo Alto. Then tack on however long it takes you to get to Caltrain. Easily a 1hr commute.
Caltrain's main issue is that trains run every hour. (with 1 super slow train in the middle). Miss a train, and you're screwed.
To me the service seems increasingly unreliable and unprofessional. Then again, I no longer feel like I'm the target audience. The numbers seem bad too; revenue was 22% down in 2023[1]. Also, "global active daily users of X via mobile apps had steadily declined during the year after Musk acquired the company, down 16% by September 2023"[2].
I'm puzzled.
[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_under_Elon_Musk#Statis...
I don't think much thought was put into it, but I do think there will be a gradual numbing effect among the comments as people get bored of the criticism. Maybe very gradual though.
Edit: It just occurred to me that you might be referring to user posts on the platform being flamebait; my answer assumed that the action (moving the HQ) was perhaps flamebait, along with other recent changes.
They are also opening a new Palo Alto office for xAI where they could move a lot of engineering talent as well. Which is likely the other big reason.
Mid-market is in terrible condition, worst I’ve seen it.
I’d feel super bad asking employees to navigate those streets while commuting in.
Not discussed enough about RTO is what a mess downtown is. And an emptier downtown is a seedier downtown, feeding the cycle.
1. SF Bay Area
2. Los Angeles Beach Cities
3. Orange County
I assume the drug use/homeless issues are less prevalent in San Jose, at least it was that way 10 yrs ago.
San Jose: your average American city, in terms of looks, but considerably more upscale.
San Francisco: an NYC-style "world-class city." It's trying for that title in terms of tempo, density, architecture.
Doesn't always succeed of course, but the cities are fundamentally going after different goals.
> They say San José is going to become another Los Angeles. Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to make that come true. [0]
In SJ, you usually have a car door separating the homeless from you. Seems like SJ is more car-oriented in design; driving in SF is really awful and if I lived there I'd avoid it
If I had to summarize: SJ -> boring, lots of jobs with great variety, easier to avoid riffraff; SF -> cooler (in character and temperature), grittier, more loud politically
Personally, if I could get a cushy corporate job in SF I'd just live there. But it seems like that's becoming harder
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California#History
Despite it being a really nice and affluent neighborhood, there was a weekly mugging outside my house. Any packages or items left outside were basically taken if left out for more than 1 hour. My neighbor’s car parked in front of the house was stolen, taken for a joyride and left in a random part of the city.
On top of that the schools were bottom of the stack in terms of scholastic achievement compared to where i grew up (upstate ny).
Bottomline, when you have a family you don’t have the luxury of tolerating political nonsense at the cost of elevated risk. Moved out.
Only things I miss is the natural beauty and outdoors of California, and the technical community. Nothing like it elsewhere.
Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live comfortably walking car-free in contemporary SF, long-term? If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods?
Reason I'm asking: the East Coast city where I currently live isn't great for software startups, and, on top of some crazy downsides of this city, there's a possibly emerging new downside: panhandler demographics shifting more towards angry 20yo men who use borderline mugging approaches, very brazenly.
Ideal for me in tech work is what I'll call "mostly-WFH-in-town", where people get most of the WFH flexibility goodness, but can also easily meet up for in-person high-bandwidth focused collaboration, personalizing, working on hardware, etc. So I'd probably want a concentration of potential colleagues who also like mostly-WFH-in-town. So I'm wondering whether SF is that place.
Zillow searches for modern apartments in parts of SF proper look more attractive, for the same money, as places in my city.
But I don't know the SF neighborhoods, and I don't know how representative are the SF stories about stepping over needles on the sidewalk all the time, finding poo on your doorstep every morning, frequent casual break-ins, etc.
Socioeconomic diversity, social justice, and safety nets are great, and preferred. Excessive poo, and other hazards, aren't.
When you walk most places, the sidewalk environment matters even more than if you're usually insulated in either a building or a car.
Visit the de Young museum's observation tower. It has a spectacular vantage point. The other things California have are: less annoying creepy crawlies, more variety of scenery and microclimates, weather, food, and relatively cheaper property taxes.
Raising a kid in SF is definitely tough, but places in the Sunset have yards, and there are some top-notch schools e.g. Lowell High School, UHS, Lick, etc.
A lot of tech people come from out of town and don’t take any time to adjust to the fact that SF has very distinct neighborhoods. Many will just draw high salaries and gravitate towards whatever is popular / flashy without considering the consequences.
I have been a long time twitter user for 15 years (some years daily and some years weekly) and I just made a threads account.
This is 2 blocks away
https://www.ktvu.com/news/report-workers-at-sf-federal-build...
This is 2 blocks away
https://sfstandard.com/2024/07/15/sideshow-crash-market-stre...
This is 1 block away
https://sfstandard.com/2023/04/10/downtown-san-francisco-who...
I hope SF can fix itself but it's arguably on the government to make the city safe and clean. I wouldn't be begrudge any company leaving it currently. I'm not that's not the only reason they're leaving and if they wanted to say in SF there are probably some other locations, maybe Mission Bay, they could have picked. But, SF is ridiculously expensive and downtown still seems like it's got further to fall. There will need to be huge changes in zoning and lots of investment for it to recover.
Wow, that does not seem like it would jive with the local character for Brisbane, from what little I know of it.
Rethorical question... There is none.
I wonder if this will be a harbinger of a retreat or shrinking of the size of the overall "tech" sector, or if it will remain a one-off. I guess that when the blockchain and ai bubbles really burst we'll see. They have a higher concentration up there for some reason.
"Elon Musk moving servers himself shows his ‘maniacal sense of urgency’ at X, formerly Twitter"
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-serv...
‘SHUT IT OFF!!’ Disruptive new ‘X’ logo removed in San Francisco:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/31/twitter...
>Construction crews dismantled the giant, blinking ‘X’ logo after 24 complaints were logged with the city
San Jose is much more permissive than San Francisco when it comes to shitty public art:
San Jose’s Quetzalcoatl: The story behind much-ridiculed poop statue:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/23/san-joses-quetzalcoat...
ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=twitter+relocating+to+austin
August 7: Twitter moving to LA.
What made LA more appealing than Texas?
Perhaps change the inflammatory title? “kills” to “moves”
FFS.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't Elon massively anti-remote?
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).
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.
When I visited SF for the first time in 2019, it felt really weird that such a rich place would have so many people living in tents in public spaces. Being naive, I saw dozens of tents in Sue Bierman Park and thought they were having an event or something. Then it dawned on me what I was seeing and it never made sense because certainly it doesn't take a lot of money to give these people something so they don't have to live in tents.
Where I live (South America), the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people. To avoid it being called charity, they "lent" the money that these people could pay in >50 years without interest. And this is a place with no tradition of philantrophy or billionaries. So I'd imagine a single billionarie could fix SF's situation in a blink of an eye, no?
The supreme court invalidated that decision, and so now they are allowed to tear the tent cities down again without having to actually find people shelter space. I imagine a lot of these encampments are going to be torn down (which will just cause them to relocate until they end up at a place where no one cares).
That is, workers would show up to the building, and then essentially never leave (and spend money at nearby businesses) until the day was over and they went home.
Why are you getting so upset, angry, emotional and screaming over someone that doesn't care about you?
Very unhealthy folks. but regardless, until the next time you will talk about Twitter / X again.
I don't understand how this beautiful city was let to deteriorate so fast.
You can just say that you never leave well-to-do regions of the US in less words.
Didn't people vote for this?
* Hundreds of spam account followers
* Sponsored content inserted in replies masquerading as real content
* Random bugs with video content constantly
* Twitter blue boosting replies to the top, making conversations effectively pay to win.
* Bot account spam comprising ~50% of the replies to any popular tweet
Despite the above, Twitter is still the best place on the internet to get the latest news and a feel for the zeitgeist. This to me is a testament of the incredible product created by Jack.
Other than that, the fyp shows me a lot of right wing content (and particularly Elon Musk posts) that I ignore, but they do show them.
Regularly as I'm scrolling down the page, it'll randomly refresh or insert/disappear posts that I'm viewing. Yeah, the site is functional, but it is not better than its ever been. Not by a mile.
The bot problem is also infinitely worse now, I rarely post anything so I have about two dozen legitimate followers, mostly people I know, and then I have a few hundred obvious bot account followers.
Twitter misinformation about a tragedy started far-right riots in the UK the other day.
And Musk commented approvingly that civil war was inevitable.