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Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

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Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#441

Post by mrastro »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #397
daghamm wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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" 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 can't understand why anyone would willingly take a job at one of his companies (but especially Xitter) at this point just knowing what's publicly known... but it's also not difficult to find someone who has worked for him and can tell you what that experience was like.

Generally agree but one cohort are folks on H1B visas that have their residency tied to their employment status with a particular company. It's transferable to a different company but requires getting an offer to another company large enough to do H1B sponsorships.

I wouldn't be surprised if the % of people working on X on an H1B rose since Elon took over.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#442

Post by dredmorbius »

whyenot wrote: post #342
htrp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like the easy commute you had in San Francisco on muni (the bus and subway network of San Francisco) becomes an annoying hour and a half-long commute on bart (The regional train system) with 2-3 transfers

You can take Caltrain to San Jose. I did this commute for several years when I lived in SF and worked in SJ. With electrification coming top Caltrain this fall, it should be faster than the current diesel trains. Depending on where Twitter's offices are in Palo Alto and San Jose, it probably won't be that bad.

BART runs with 20 minute headways on longer routes (and as little as 4 minutes through San Francisco). The six CalTrain "baby bullet" express trains run hourly at best, with long service lapses mid-day and in the late evenings. Locals run more often (about every 10--20 minutes during peak commute hours) but add a half-hour to the just over one-hour express schedule.

(Both are still faster by far than driving, particularly during rush hour.)

CalTrain: https://www.caltrain.com/media/22502/download>

BART's Green Line (Daly City - Beryessa / North San Jose) departs every 20 minutes from 4:55 am though 7:36 pm (southbound) and 4:59 am through 6:49 pm (northbound):

https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-01/January%201...>

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#443

Post by bastardoperator »

seizethecheese wrote: post #399
janalsncm wrote: post #371

Had a recruiter call with Twitter a few months ago. Mandatory in office 5 days per week. Among other things, an hour commute both ways to work was not acceptable. 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.

I’ve had several meetings, either in Twitter office or around it, and the street scene is very bad in that part of SF. If the claim is that this is a motivation for the move, it certainly passes the sniff test for me.

So you've been able to gauge life and the street scene in SF based on several meetings? That's super interesting. I would argue the Embarcadero is fairly nice and I live here, but what do I know.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#444

Post by throw4847285 »

hintymad wrote: post #412

There is a famous paper about the location of company headquarters: they get as close as possible to the residence of company CEOs. If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm actually curious if the location of company headquarters has to do with the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a ha…

Just in response to your second point, I do think that's specific to you and your circles. I know multiple retired or semi-retired people who have moved towards the center of a city. Without work to keep them occupied, they want the hustle and bustle, which means something to do. And driving has become more of a hassle and a barrier to the kinds of lives they want to live. These are east coast or midwest cities, so maybe there is something about SF that's different, but that's my experience.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#445

Post by EricE »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #42
yodsanklai wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

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.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#446

Post by janalsncm »

seizethecheese wrote: post #399
janalsncm wrote: post #371

Had a recruiter call with Twitter a few months ago. Mandatory in office 5 days per week. Among other things, an hour commute both ways to work was not acceptable. 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.

I’ve had several meetings, either in Twitter office or around it, and the street scene is very bad in that part of SF. If the claim is that this is a motivation for the move, it certainly passes the sniff test for me.

That’s fair, I never visited the office. But if that was the only issue maybe they’d consider a different part of SF, which would be easier for current employees.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#447

Post by EricE »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #217
milkshakes wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a resource allocation issue. SF government alone spends almost a billion a year[1] on trying to improve the situation. That's not including the non-profit spending. Money won't buy the city out of this situation as long as there exist people who don't want to live in homes and play by the rules. 1: https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/

1 billion dollars / 8500[1] homeless people = 117 thousand dollars. The median household income in SF is 119 thousand[2]. I get that you wouldn't want to just pay them a salary because of second-order effects, but that kind of spend without even getting them sheltered strongly suggests resources are not being allocated well. [1] https://www.sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-populat... [2] https://smartasset.co…

If you gave them $117K a year they would be dead within a month ODing on the mass quantities of drugs they can now afford. Money is not the issue with homelessness, and until people get that out of their heads the problem will not be solved.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#448

Post by fwip »

wonderwonder wrote: post #383
pcwalton wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty undeniable that the bot problem is significantly worse than it was before Musk. (I'm not going to take a position on the value of any of the other changes to the product.)

It is interesting that they appear to have solved or at least dramatically reduced the porn spam. Still cant open a post though without seeing 10+ posts about something completely unrelated in the comments

I don't recall ever seeing porn spam in my ~8 years of using the site pre-Musk. Probably a few incidents here and there, but nothing notable enough that I remember it happening.

If the skeleton crew has finally managed to fix it more than a year after causing it, I guess that counts for something.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#449

Post by rabuse »

jandrese wrote: post #415
jsheard wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've already cut about 80% of their workforce since Elon took over, I'm not sure how much more attrition they can take. Sure the site still mostly works in the technical sense, but the way it works now has led to a significant decline in revenue and active users.

4Chan was run by like one guy using the change he found in the cushions of his couch. Getting the pixels on people's screens is the easy part. Keeping the Nazis and bots at bay is the expensive part. You have to do the latter if you want to keep the advertisers on your site, which is why X switched to a more for-pay model and still loses money hand over fist. Being able to pay to have your voice amplified has been a…

I much prefer the Twitter of today. Since I'm a grown adult, I can handle some mean words being seen by my eyes, and just ignoring what I don't like. It's nice seeing a balance of both sides of an argument now, rather than only seeing the left biased information.

Re: Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

#450

Post by SoftTalker »

whyenot wrote: post #342
htrp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like the easy commute you had in San Francisco on muni (the bus and subway network of San Francisco) becomes an annoying hour and a half-long commute on bart (The regional train system) with 2-3 transfers

You can take Caltrain to San Jose. I did this commute for several years when I lived in SF and worked in SJ. With electrification coming top Caltrain this fall, it should be faster than the current diesel trains. Depending on where Twitter's offices are in Palo Alto and San Jose, it probably won't be that bad.

Are they upgrading the tracks as well? Diesel trains can run at 80mph no problem, which is about the maximum any standard US railroad supports. If the track is built to high speed standards you could go faster.
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