141–150 of 424 posts
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The land values are legit. That they cannot be amortized across many occupants is not.
I get where you are coming from, but my intuition is that we have actually created a massive bubble in land prices by restricting use so much. Land would get a hell of a lot cheaper if we massively decreased demand by letting people live in ways that use less land.
People won't continue making their current SF salary by working out of Farmville, Ohio. I think this point is missed by many I fully expect Twitter, for example, to come out with salary adjustment policies for people who want to work from home from an entirely different city and state
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
I'm considering it. But I am pretty sure that once things open up, my office culture is going back to one where all the important decisions get made in the hallways after a meeting. Being remote in that scenario means you have no say, and you miss out on important information.
Being the only remote person on a team is really hard. I’ve both done it and been on teams where someone else does it. It’s less than ideal for everyone. It’s a constant nag that never goes away (oh did you remember to join the hangout for Matt?) and pretty much no matter what you miss out on a good deal of communication. I definitely think remote would work best when everyone is doing it.
"In 2013, Yahoo Inc. decided its lax policies on working from home had prevented it from innovating and required everyone to come back to the office." -- and now in 2020 Yahoo is an innovative power house...
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My commute is also my morning and evening cardio routine as a bike 5 miles each way. I've been really missing the every day bike rides this year.
See, now this sounds awesome. Everyone's getting offended for sport but what I'm referring to is the fact that we have a huge portion of the US who sits in a car all day and night, clogging up highways and polluting the air. You bike to and from work? That's fantastic, if I could do that I'd be in the office a few days a week too, as I also road bike. But so many people don't do that.
I walk to work, and a lot of my work involves close collaboration in ways that teleconferencing makes really hard (math or other collaborative diagramming over Zoom? Hah!). And the lag makes a lot of communication extremely difficult. Perhaps we will learn to deal with our inadequate technology, or maybe the tech will get better, but my frustration level has gone through the roof with working from home.
So though I despise the hours-in-a-car-per-day requirement that our city planning has forced on people, I also had a bad reaction to your initial comment :)
I'm pretty bearish on the pandemic actually leading to massive change in the number of people permanently working from home. My boss put out a survey a week or two ago among my org (30 or so people), and 70% said that they want to work from the office, full time, 20% said some time or most of the time, and 10% said fully remote. And this is a group of people that would be largely well suited to working from home duri…
Many organizations are going to be significantly cash-strapped at the end of this recession. One of the juiciest targets will be cutting the high fixed cost of office leases. Especially in expensive areas like Silicon Valley. If a company can push the average employee to work from home 3 days a week, they can convert to floating desks and cut their real estate costs by 50% or more.
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I live in SF but rented a vacation rental for May and June. No point to live in my 600sqft condo when everything is closed and I can rent a 2000sqft house with a pool for small change.
I'm planning to do the same. Put things into storage and get a better view. Any advice finding a place?
This could finally help solve the housing crisis in many of America's large cities. Every employee who moves out frees up one apartment for everyone else. 30,000 employees leaving is equivalent to building 30,000 apartments.
The number of tech workers in the bay who have zero roommates is a lot smaller than you seem to think.
The pairing of working in an office with a hellish commute is a bit odd. Maybe SF really is a parallel universe. Here in the UK, basically anyone earning a tech salary can afford to live within 10-20 mins cycle of work, even if they want children. You won't have a home with a garden and all the rest of the knick knacks, sure, but that's a different discussion.
Most techies in SF could afford to live relatively close to work, or without roommates, or both. The reason why they don't is still due to the high rent though. When living with a roommate or two, or living a bit further away means you get an extra $1000+ a month to spend on other things, that can be very enticing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in SF but rented a vacation rental for May and June. No point to live in my 600sqft condo when everything is closed and I can rent a 2000sqft house with a pool for small change.
I'm planning to do the same. Put things into storage and get a better view. Any advice finding a place?