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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

#721

Post by throwaway2037 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #381
bcx wrote: post #130

It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes. I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision. I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin. As for commutes, I’d b…

> Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park. This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at 313 Brandan next to South Park. This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pret…

    > infrastructure improvements
Do you mean biking infrastructure? Also, what do you do during the rainy season?

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

#722

Post by undersuit »

robertoandred wrote: post #651
mempko wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crime is a function of inequality.

Don't blame crime on the poor.

In an unequal society the crime could just be in the areas of high poverty because the government chooses to avoid improving those areas. Off the top of my head that's just one way to interpret "Crime is a function of inequality."

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

#723

Post by hughesjj »

hintymad wrote: post #557
jacobolus wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities are far more kid-friendly than suburbs, especially for kids from age ~9–18. Everything is walkable or can be reached by transit, many more amenities and activities are accessible, kids are dramatically less dependent on parents or other caretakers to constantly chaperone them, and there are a wider variety of other kids around with many niche interests. Some kids' parents irrationally believe cities will be ba…

> For the kids themselves, cities are wonderful and suburbs are often a kind of prison I grew up in a mega city and I agree that cities are wonderful for kids, at least they were wonderful for me and my friends. I'd venture to guess that kids don't care. Cities or not, the world is just so much fun and exciting. I don't know if suburbs are prisons for kids, though. My kids love suburbs, and they also love cities when…

> I don't know if suburbs are prisons for kids, though.

Personally, I grew up in a suburb that didn't have transit and it was miserable. I barely saw my friends until I got a car. Every time I go back with my lady it's miserable for both of us because, besides family, there's just nothing there but some cookie cutter parks. There was one historical park that's still nice but its also a mile away from my mom's house and there's inconsistent sidewalks (it's either take a much longer route or risk walking alongside a 1 ft wide shoulder with a 35mph speed limit and curves.

I suppose it heavily depends on the suburb.

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

#724

Post by dheera »

hylaride wrote: post #717
throwaway2037 wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In SF, the northeast quadrant has most of the good public transit. Does that not fit your needs? And, I disagree that Taipei and Chengdu are significantly cleaner than SF -- about the same level of grime in my experience.

There’s different meanings to “cleanliness”. A bit of grime is fine. Drug paraphernalia, human feces, and tons of homelessness is another matter.

Yeah exactly.

Even I, a non-homeless tech worker, have been forced to pee in the bushes next to a sidewalk in SF, because I was refused restroom access by 5 businesses in a row and I was already getting heart palpitations trying to hold it in.

I have never been refused restroom access (and there was almost always a public one within 100m at all times) in most modern Asian cities. Or even south bay (which is basically Asia), people are usually nice here about letting you use restrooms.

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

#725

Post by dehrmann »

paulsutter wrote: post #434

The issue is the San Francisco gross receipts tax, which becomes problematic for any payments company because it applies to the payments volume Twitter is planning to become a payments platform

Since a gross receipts tax hits anything other than small, local stores inconsistently, I'm not sure what behavior it's trying to drive. It also taxes revenue rather than income, so yes, it makes anything ulta-low margin like a payments platform DOA.

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

#726

Post by Onavo »

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…

> 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.

The 25-35 crowd are probably the worst employees that Twitter can ask for; too experienced to "keep their head down" and too young to suffer from ageism and be tied down with families. For companies like Google and Twitter that traditionally lean left and encourage employees to speak up, moving the company headquarters is probably the easiest way to filter out activist employees (since these days the company is making a hard pivot to a privately held conservative operating model).

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

#727

Post by ulfw »

citizenkeen wrote: post #194
ulfw wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are quite boring mid-size cities that are heavily overpriced for what they offer. SF is more exciting/prettier yet less safe than SJ.

The 17th largest city in the US is mid-sized?

It's not even a million population. Certainly would never call San Jose or San Francisco a metropolis.

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

#728

Post by hylaride »

neilv wrote: post #704
rapatel0 wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live comfortably walking car-free in contemporary SF, long-term? If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods? I used this when doing analysis. It's pretty good. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/comparison.jsp From a pure cost, POV you burn most of your money on rent and food. When we had visitors, I had to plan out my budget to cover meals for ever…

Thank you for the info. > In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time. Are we talking only about having basic city street savvy (e.g., you're perceived as a savvy native rather than easy pickings, can spot the usual threats and risks without trying, and can avoid or handle the…

Don’t live in SF, but was a frequent visitor. During the day you’ll be fine if you don’t look like a dumb tourist and mind your own business. Some of SF’s main cultural attractions are in “rough” neighbourhoods like Chinatown. As night falls and the street life thins out, you probably don’t want to wander the areas like the tenderloin or most dark red places on this map: https://gisgeography.com/san-francisco-crime-map/ but even the vast majority of the crime there is petty. You’re still unlikely to be a victim of violent crime, but the chances are higher that you’ll be assaulted by somebody desperate for a fix.

The actual violent crime rates in SF are still below the national average, but the drug issues are just very, very visible.

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

#729

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

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.

For highly competitive people, it's the perfect place to be. There's comradery in the suck, long hours and seemigly crazy demands of Elon. At the end of the day you are sourrounded by people obsessed with the mission and working extremely long hours on cool shit.

After two internships at Tesla i understood why people joined cults.

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

#730

Post by jjav »

quesera wrote: post #710
jjav wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

This is not correct at all. When Twitter was launched, SF was overflowing with startups on every corner. In fact it was the second wave of SF startups, being a handful of years after the dot com crash. The only thing even slightly surprising about Twitter's location was that they were way down in South Park instead of more solidly in South of Market. They moved to the Tenderloin building in 2012.

> SF was overflowing with startups on every corner.

Can you name a handful of known startups headquartered in SF in the early 2000s?

I tried searching for stats on this but it seems more difficult than I have time for. So I turned to chatgpt, which (FWIW) agrees with my recollection:

In the year 2000, Silicon Valley startups were predominantly located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly in cities like Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose. San Francisco itself was not as prominent a hub for tech startups at that time.

While exact percentages are difficult to ascertain without specific data, it is generally understood that a relatively small percentage of Silicon Valley startups were headquartered within San Francisco city limits in 2000. The tech startup scene in San Francisco began to grow significantly later, particularly in the mid-2000s and beyond.

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