151–160 of 308 posts
Remote work and starting the company elsewhere are pretty easy solutions to this problem.
If all of your employees are remote, what do you show your investors, partners, board members, and creditors when they want a tour of your facility? How do you show them that you've got smart people working on hard problems? For some (bad?) startups, this is an even more valuable function of engineers than engineering.
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We've tried and found that remote engineers are less effective, they miss out a lot from group whiteboard discussions, overhearing office chatter "Hey bill, service XX crashed again because of YY (and Mike overhears and says "Oh yeah, I saw YY in service ZZ too and fixed it"), and just general team cohesiveness. In theory we could hire more people for less salary if we had a remote workforce, but we're still a small…
When teams have problems with remote v local employees, I've found this to be because they actively treat them differently, sometimes without realizing it. It takes work to establish your culture to work remotely well -- if you just hire some people that you only ever hear on Skype during standup and give them work, they don't become enmeshed in the fabric of the company. Cliques form everywhere but they can be espec…
Yeah, some teams like to take advantage of the far richer communication that's available in person rather than handicapping everyone to the lowest common denominator.
If you attempt it again, make sure you evaluate whether you've built a culture based on 'being there' before hiring people who can't be.
IOW, discourage informal social interactions between employees. Don't permit them to go to lunch together and talk at leisure about things.
Companies do not like spending money they don't have to. So since the Internet hasn't killed business travel, there must be a very good reason its still worth it.
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What happens if those areas simply don't start doing well again? Large parts of America have been declining for generations (West Virginia, much of Ohio, etc)
Which is likely. Echoes of the eurozone here for sure; SF probably needs 8% interest rates but even 0% is doing very little for the Rust Belt and other perennially depressed regions. Now, the eurozone critics think the problem is lack of fiscal union, but the US suggests it goes a lot deeper than that.
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>Making $140k per year is the San Fran equivalent of minimum wage Is this really true? Seems far-fetched. Isn't that $20-30k higher than the Google base starting salary?
No, I don't know why people always say that. I live on less then half that. I eat out, drink, do stuff on weekends and pay my school loans and bills. Thats like 7000 a month? If you can't get by with that comfortably high cost of living is not your issue...
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Yup. This is a huge advantage to SoMa. I even hear hesitations around FiDi as it's not easily accessible by Caltrain (let alone Oakland). The Central Subway and new Transbay Terminal might alter this. That said, I don't think the new Transbay will directly link with BART -- will still be a walk, which is a bit of a shame.
Of course the FiDi is accessible by Caltrain-just get off at Momtgomery or Embarcadero. New stereotype of SF tech workers- lazy and class privileged!
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ZenPayroll is opening a Denver, CO office, looking to hire 100 people[1]. [1] http://fortune.com/2015/07/28/zenpayroll-jobs-denver-colorad...
Boulder is an incredibly difficult market to hire in. I was talkign to the head of Google Boulder when he mentioned they can't even get engineers hired there.
Things are not cheap here in Bend, but I have more of a feeling of getting in earlier, while things are still growing.
Why is it just assumed economic downfalls and recessions should happen every 7-10 years? Self fulfilling prophecy? Bugs in the system?
My hypothesis is that it is a real thing, and it has to do with human behavior. 7-10 years is enough time for enough people to forget the pain of a previous crash. It's enough time for a new generation to arise. There are of course other cycles based on human time scales. In movie soundtracks, there is a rule that you should never insert a song 0-15 years old. It either has to be brand new, or older than 15 years. Wh…
Especially considering historical blunders and clear lessons that we've learned.
VCs have longer time-horizons (a typical VC fund will be spent over 5 or so years) and appear more stable to landlords. In addition, one of the toughest problems for VCs as I understand is dealflow - when it comes to a super-competitive round, Andreessen or Sequoia will often push other VC firms out of the round by throwing their prestige around.
SF Office space could make the difference to a hot start-up looking to raise their Seed or Series A and move to the city, especially coupled with a time horizon of only 12-24 months. It may not be enough to lead a competitive round, but may certainly enough to get a piece of it.
Or, consider starting a company outside of San Francisco. Not just outside of SoMA, actually outside of San Francisco. (I know, I know, blasphemy.) Eventually the price of real estate and labor will be so high that the relative disadvantages of other locations will not matter.
I wish people would do that. I know when I see jobs that interest me, they're almost always in SF or NYC. Neither location is somewhere I'd flourish. Seriously, what is the actual appeal of SF? I just don't see it.
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WeWork is selling risk reduction for cash. Should there be a downturn in tech, WeWork will be left holding the bag.
I'm working out of WeWork (Chicago office) and I think the SF WeWork is much different from most of their other locations. While there are a few venture backed startups here, most of the companies tend to be small businesses or single person companies that were previously at places like Regis or working out of Starbucks. For example some companies here: [model agency, recruiting agency, marketing firms, lawyers, acco…