361–370 of 379 posts
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> Steve & Alexis wanted to write an app that would allow you to order food from your feature phone. PG thought it was a bad idea, http://www.just-eat.com/
This seems to be a perenially popular bad startup idea. Sergey Brin's previous idea, before teaming up with Larry to found Google, was a startup to let people order pizza via fax machine.
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Last company I've worked in moved headquarters 6,500 km. Most of the business-critical employees and developers moved with it. All this drama about relocating office a couple subway stops seems ridiculous.
Daly City is a world away from 520 3rd. There is nothing of any kind worth mentioning in Daly City. There is culture, entertainment, education, recreation, and all the benefits of real city life steps away from Reddit's current office. In addition the building at 520 3rd has a tradition of housing famous Internet companies.
I understand the argument about exacerbating commutes (even though it sounds crazy for a short-distance move) but I think this one is quite weak.
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I happen to agree with everything you just said, but by American standards, it’s… well it’s in the top ten, I guess. Compare Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, or New York City to Daly City and then tell me where San Francisco falls on the scale.
I moved to SF from my college town of Springfield, Missouri. It's a town of 150k people surrounding by the rural Ozarks. Obviously, there's nowhere near as much art, music, comedy or "culture" as in SF, but it's immensely easier to get around, and much more convenient to do normal errands like buying groceries, household items, etc. And don't even dare compare rental and home prices. I certainly won't claim Springfie…
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What about the office location was so contentious that the CEO would quit?
Generally such a resignation is about being-overruled (board no-confidence), rather than just the particulars of one decision. With ~sama's revelation that Wong preferred a Daly City HQ, the battle-lines could have been: Pro-Daly-City: "more space, cheaper, less-cool, longer-runway, more employees who've self-selected for willingness to do Reddit muckwork vs. glamorous SoMa networking, outsider perspective" Pro-SF: "…
Could the new team please review and censor some of the unquestionably evil subreddits? (ie: brutalizing women, dead babies, animal sex, etc). There's just no reason whatsoever such places ought to exist. Out of conscience, I chose to stop reading Reddit for allowing such subs to exist. I am not asking others to do the same or to adopt my beliefs, but I say this because I really enjoyed being a redditor. I'd like to…
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In my experience you always loose employees when moving offices. It's a really weird feeling just after the move and takes a while to get back into the grove.
Last place I worked, we moved just a few blocks away, from a really, really awful crappy warehouse in Sunnyvale to a pretty spiffy new facility also in Sunnyvale. I don't think we lost anyone due to that move. So, lesson is to make sure your new office is awesome and not that geographically far from your old one?
Moving from one city to another can be highly disruptive.
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Each subreddit needs a good set of mods, especially when there are thousands of subscribers. Once a subreddit hits some magic number, it devolves into a stream of image links to "hey I made a cake/painting/object with [subject of subreddit] on it". Mods can very easily guide users toward discussion. r/atheism infamously banned images altogether, and aside from the "REVOLT I WANT MEMES IN MY R/ATHEISM" posts, people a…
The challenge is that what we think of as high quality content is not what Reddit Inc. has seen leading the growth. Images and fluffy content are easier to consume, and therefore more profitable for the site.
Which is fine, but you have to make some attempt and consolidating that type of content as much as possible. An example being to let /r/gaming run wild with the image macros and meme posts, but then rule those out on the subreddits for specific games. If you don't, you just end up with each game's subreddit becoming basically a filtered version of /r/gaming.
Oh, good. Put a SJW at the top of Reddit's chain of command. The drain circling is making sucking sounds now... http://www.scribd.com/doc/111050031/Pao-Complaint
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Moving an office like this scenario and timeline can and in most cases, does cause tectonic shift in the company's dynamic. There's a ripple effect through far reaching aspects of the employees lives that effect there work. On another note- Office location can be the most personal aspect of business to an exec processing the decision. A territorial undercurrent is in play.
At my old company, as the lease at our slightly too small and horribly boring office park was set to renew, moving was floated. Everyone in the office was immediately for it. However, the CEO and a few other key employees were thinking further out in the southeastern suburbs, and everyone else assumed that meant into the city, centrally located, with cheaper rents. We ended up staying in the office park that no one r…
A company I worked at in the 90s moved their office from downtown Chicago to the suburbs, seemingly so the executives would have a shorter commute. As a consulting firm, most of the employees were younger, didn't have families, and lived in the city and so ended up leaving the company when their commute changed. They also had trouble recruiting because of the new location. Having the only office in the suburbs didn't last long and they had to re-open a downtown office.
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Daly City is a world away from 520 3rd. There is nothing of any kind worth mentioning in Daly City. There is culture, entertainment, education, recreation, and all the benefits of real city life steps away from Reddit's current office. In addition the building at 520 3rd has a tradition of housing famous Internet companies.
As someone completely unaffiliated with San Francisco, all of this honestly just makes the employees sound like primadonnas. While it may be cool to be "steps away" from that stuff you listed (and I doubt you're being fair to Daly City), it certainly shouldn't make or break a job that you're otherwise happy with. I understand the argument about exacerbating commutes (even though it sounds crazy for a short-distance m…
Let's do the math.
There are 24 hours in a day. You should be sleeping for ~8 of those leaving 16. Assuming you are supposed to be at the office for 8 hours (pipe dream, but let's just go for it) that leaves 8 hours of time for other stuff. If you previously had a great 15-30 minute commute then you would have 7 hours of free time to work on side projects and do things you want to do. That would be a pretty sweet normal life. Adding an extra hour to the commute cuts your free time down by ~30%. That is a big deal.
I also find it very helpful to include any time spent commuting as "working time" when considering where to work. You should also consider the increased cost to commute from a more like this. An extra hour of driving 5 days/week represents a non-trivial amount of money. So the salary needs to compensate, or the time at the office needs to go down.
No matter how you look at this, a move like this is asking all of the employees on the short end of the stick to effectively take home less money (not exactly a pay cut, but the end result is the same).
Edit: oh and I'm not from SF, I live in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. This has nothing to do with SF.