I really liked the "move to Daly City" idea. Millbrae also seems like it would make sense.
What's the benefit of moving to Daly City vs SF proper? I'm not from the bay area, so I'm not familiar with why this would be a problem.
A new team at Reddit
111–120 of 379 posts
Re: A new team at Reddit
#112Re: A new team at Reddit
#113I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened. Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, et…
October 1: Yishan wants all employees to move to San Francisco. Early November: "jk, we're moving to Daly City." Even though Daly City is a BART away, the fact that this decision happened in 1 month is absurd.
It was never a "jk, Daly City." From the initial announcement it was mentioned that they were considering options a little south of SF proper.
Re: A new team at Reddit
#114Does this mean that Reddit will start evolving again? It's been stagnating for years with few user-facing changes. The UI is a complete mess. From the outside at least, it looks like they've stopped investing in it and are just milking it until it dies.
Wow, I hope not. I have most of the things they added turned off in settings, and the UI of the site as it is seems very difficult to improve upon, as long as all the images and such are off.
I would much rather they focus on making it fast and stable (I quickly tire of "we took too long to make this page for you"), and leave the UI alone.
Re: A new team at Reddit
#115I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened. Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, et…
October 1: Yishan wants all employees to move to San Francisco. Early November: "jk, we're moving to Daly City." Even though Daly City is a BART away, the fact that this decision happened in 1 month is absurd.
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.
Re: A new team at Reddit
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
5x growth is great, but Reddit definitely has a "if it isn't broke don't fix it" mentality (probably a fear of "digging"). I struggle to attribute that growth to one CEO's decisions, when it really seems more like inevitable growth due to the success of the product and community that was defined long before he took the helm. Arguably, by Alexis (community) & Steve (product).
Reddit is a company with a huge user base and any investor willing to do his job (in spite of the moral or social implications) is going to want to squeeze that teat for every drop of ARPU he can get. Because where else are the users going to go? Digg? Slashdot? 4chan?
Where else are the users going to go? Try WhoaVerse.
Re: A new team at Reddit
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe Wong wanted to move HQ to the Valley proper, rather than SF itself? Almost all corporate HQ relocations move closer to the CEO's home. But also, there's a (plausibly-fair) knock on SF-city-based companies as being more superficial, frothier, and more prone to distraction and high-burn rates than those in the more-authentically-nerdy Valley. Maybe someone can leak where Wong wanted the new HQ to be.
> Almost all corporate HQ relocations move closer to the CEO's home. Is there any evidence of that? Seems quite interesting..
It was already folklore back when I was first part of a company discussing new office locations, in the 90s. (My father may have even mentioned it when I was child.) Since then, I've observed it often – though in fairness that may be confirmation bias.
The ~cschmidt sibling reply highlights a Joel-on-Software post about the phenomenon from 2003, attributed to a 20th-century urbanist/organizational-analyst, William Whyte, perhaps as coined in a 1958 book.
Here's a critique of a Connecticut tax incentive from earlier this year that notes all 5 resulting corporate relocations reduced their CEO's commute:
http://www.raisinghale.com/2014/07/16/connecticut-taxpayers-...
Re: A new team at Reddit
#118Recently watched the video of Ben Horowitz in How to Start a Startup class where he talked about How as CEO it is very important that you should take the perspective of Employees too. Got to know from recent article in NYTimes that Mr. Wong made mistakes twice : first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF and then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons. Mr. Horowitz'…
"then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons." To be honest, this is what he should have done. One-sided stories without any sort of opposition on Reddit end up starting Internet mobs and people get fired over it (or forced to quit due to threats). This is exactly what happened with the Mozilla CEO. The culture of Internet mob mentality has created this environment. "first by request…
Well, Mozilla's CEO had actually donated money to anti-gay causes.... as opposed to reddit, where what the ex employee was saying was false
Re: A new team at Reddit
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
5x growth is great, but Reddit definitely has a "if it isn't broke don't fix it" mentality (probably a fear of "digging"). I struggle to attribute that growth to one CEO's decisions, when it really seems more like inevitable growth due to the success of the product and community that was defined long before he took the helm. Arguably, by Alexis (community) & Steve (product).
Reddit is a company with a huge user base and any investor willing to do his job (in spite of the moral or social implications) is going to want to squeeze that teat for every drop of ARPU he can get. Because where else are the users going to go? Digg? Slashdot? 4chan?
Imgur, most likely
Re: A new team at Reddit
#120I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened. Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, et…
I don't want it to sound like you are being dishonest about this, and it's possible there were things going on in Yishan's head that you were not aware of, but "a new team at reddit" in 8 days makes it a bit hard to believe this came completely out of nowhere.