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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

#501

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.

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

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away from the windows, as there was shooting outside. About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks. I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until…

> I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger... Like forcing them to drive to the office 2-5 days each week when they could continue working from home?

the most dangerous thing the average N American does every day is drive...

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

#503

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…

The mentioned South Bay locations are xAI's Palo Alto office, and an office in Santana Row. Both locations likely have connections to Caltrain.

I don't know where xAI's Palo Alto office is, but transit in the corporate Palo Alto office are generally good. If xAI is in the Stanford Research Park, you'll be taking a shuttle that runs only during commute times, and takes 15-30 minutes, depending on where exactly you get off.

Santana Row is more confusing. You'll travel either to Santa Clara or San Jose and take a bus. From Santa Clara, the bus is ~15 minutes. From San Jose, the bus is faster, but you've got a half- or one-mile walk.

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

#504

Realistically, X is better than its ever been; community notes have been a game-changer in terms of fact-checking. Higher quality and much more balanced.

What are you talking about? Open any twitter link and there is a pretty good chance it just doesn't work lol. And even if it does work hopefully it isn't a thread because you won't see any of the parent comments or replies.

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

#505

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…

and let's not forget the increase in crime that SF has experienced. Even department/CVS/etc stores have had to close due to the increase in crime.

Suburbs on average have less crime. i wouldn't say that south bay is ideal but it's better than SF.

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

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective living in Asia I’d place it on par with a small rural village

This is a very funny comment. Small rural villages in China do not have 61 story buildings. Non-major cities do, but not “small rural villages”.

China has over 100 cities with > 1 million population. (113 to be precise).

The 100th-ranked US city (Huntsville, AL) has a population of 225k. (The 113th, Fayetville, NC, has just under 210k.)

San Francisco, with 808k population, would rank 126th in China. Not "small rural", but definitely a 2nd or 3rd tier city at best. (The comparable Chinese city, Anqing, is a prefecture-level city in the southwest of Anhi Province, and has, to boot, 631 years on SF.)

Consider that Wuhan, a city in China you'd likely never have heard of prior to early 2020, has a population of 11 million, more than any US city, and ranks 9th overall in population within China.

China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...>

US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...>

Anquing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anqing>

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

#507

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.

... a literal sniff test? from what I hear (not having been there in more than a few years), it's become quite a problem.

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

#508
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away from the windows, as there was shooting outside. About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks. I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until…

My first week working in a finance firm in midtown Manhattan there was a significant shooting. These things happen everywhere (edit: in the US) unfortunately. I'm not convinced that a more suburban location that forces people to drive would actually be any safer.

I have lived 39 years here in New Zealand and have never witnessed or been near a shooting. I'm not saying shootings have never happened in New Zealand, but the idea that these things "happen everywhere" is asinine.

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

#509

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…

> 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 hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day.

IME this is definitely true and it's often very intentional. One of the major reasons SF stole the startup scene from SV is that younger startup employees wanted to live in SF. As a startup founder you are very strongly incentivized to go where the talent is (or wants to be). When I was considering where to set up my startup a few months ago this was a huge consideration. Not quite at the level of HQ, but there's a reason Google has offices in both SF and South Bay as well, or in both SLU/SLU-area Seattle + across Lake Washington.

> If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF. I don't think it's about more vs less as much as matching the demographics of your typical employee. Eg experience levels, pay, work culture, personality, mix of job roles

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

#510

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…

Not relevant to any current actions by Twitter, but an interesting historical perspective is that it was very rare for a tech company to be in San Francisco.

Approximately all tech companies were in Silicon Valley proper (thus named) which is about (depending on who was drawing the boundaries) about 30-60 minutes south of San Francisco.

When Twitter opened in San Francisco I distinctly remember how weird it was to see a tech company up in SF. Then found it was due to tax breaks SF was creating for these companies and then lots more tech companies started showing up in SF.

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