Lyft Moves Customer Support Team to Nashville to Combat High-Priced SF Market
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Sort of a big ask, no?
Move to another state, take less salary or be fired.
Not saying it's not the right move for the company, but it's sort of a raw deal for the reps.
Let's do a hypothetical. Glassdoor suggests Lyft support makes about $40k a year. Let's suppose a cost of living in SF of $35k a year. (Our imaginary support rep is young and spends a little recklessly. Ah, youth!) Now, they up and move to Tennessee, and take, say, a 15% pay cut. Now they're down to $34k/year; how will they make ends meet? Well, their cost of living is halved (18k/year) - they can take a little bit of a lifestyle upgrade and still have $10k in their bank account in December.
Moving across the country is a rough proposition, but unless Lyft is asking for something like a 30% pay cut, the salary is a carrot and not a stick.
So long as you don't mind being stranded there.
* Nashville, TN
* Atlanta, GA (Assuming that I still possess enough of my tech "fortune" to purchase a place inside city limits.)
* Chattanooga, TN (For EPB internet and what appears to be sensible city stewardship, obviously.)
[0] Not even to pass through on the periodic AL<->PA trips I used to take!
Google (Chapel Hill -- small engineering office mostly used to recruit interns from UNC & Duke)
Citrix (downtown Raleigh -- I think this is their biggest office outside Santa Clara, and they consistently have 50-75 job openings there)
NetApp, Microsoft, Lenovo (their HQ), IBM (still a major presence even though it's shrunk a lot over the past decade), Genband/Avaya/Ciena (all created after Nortel's implosion), BASF, Bayer CropScience, SAS (HQ), John Deere, Credit Suisse, Cree (HQ), EMC, Fidelity Investments, RTI International, the US EPA, and many more.
In biotech, there's, Pfizer, Biogen, Merck, UCB Biosciences, Quintiles, Parexel, PPD, United Therapeutics, Glaxo SmithKline, Syngenta, and many, many more pharmas & CROs.
Also, Charlotte. It's like Atlanta, but better/smaller/in the foothills of NC. So like Atlanta, but better.
I toured Chattanooga the other day. It's a cute town, but it felt kind of small and somewhat empty to me. I lived in Atlanta for 4 years during my undergrad. Despite being only 30 minutes away from my immediate family, Atlanta is one of my least favorite cities in the US. Too much crime, too little ambition (at least compared to SF and NY), horrible traffic, and not much "living" going on within the city. Everyone basically commutes into it from the suburbs for work and then drives back out in the evening. If you wander around SF, you see all kinds of people out and about. In Atlanta, everyone's cooped up inside; the sidewalks are mostly empty.
Raleigh, Cary, and Charlotte are nice, but they're a little too suburban/vanilla for my taste.
Nashville is quickly becoming my top choice (if I'm unable to live in San Francisco or Austin, TX). I have some family there, and I recently read that it's one of the fastest growing cities for 25-30 year olds interesting in technology.
So, I don't know... as someone who's lived here almost all my life, I just wish the South had at least one big city that was world class in something.
Of course there's also the issue of do you want to stay in the customer support sector if you can possibly help it!
And it's SF - Nashville, not NYC to Nashville. It's not like they're leaving a real world class city with irreplaceable amenities.
Dan Francisco residents like to consider San Francisco a world class city with irreplaceable amenities.
As a New Yorker, I find it amusing, since San Francisco seems to me like a quaint little provincial town, but what matters is that people moving to Nashville will likely feel that way, whether or not it's actually they.
Is it really, when you're not paying $3500/mo for a studio in TL?
Is this just a case of them saying "well, we offered the the choice, they chose to quit"?
Most call center staff (non-technical) are easily and quickly trained on the job. There is also very high turnover in the industry, so quickly ramping up trained staff is part of basic operations. The recruits don't have to have any specialized skills other than being literate.
The CRM systems in place are also designed with a lot of call scripting in place to guide the conversations based on target companies and customers. Generally a single call center handles the customer service operations of multiple companies and teams of CSRS can be reconfigured to support different companies at different times.
One thing to keep in mind, turn over in customer service is pretty high. You could open another office and with natural attrition make the move without layoffs in ~18 months.
Harder to make the argument for expert-tree customer support though, I'll grant you that.
At some point, companies are going to have to get with the program if they want to keep their best people. That will happen once enough of them can't fill senior roles. They'll respond to quality of life issues—those are getting more important in hiring, not less. You don't need to locate your engineering team in SF and force them to put up with all that bullshit. Make life easier for them, not harder.
I envisage a whole wall that's a screen with a camera, acting like a portal to a different office location. Stick it in a corridor or a tearoom, a common area where people can just encounter one another at random and chat. If you want to have an in-depth talk with someone at another office, send them a message asking to meet at one of the portal locations rather than scheduling a Skype session. Encourage people to meet and introduce themselves to people they happen to see through the portal.
Does anyone do this kind of thing?
I wonder if there is a professional market for this? Something like a Slack for audio.
For a partially distributed company you just come to the office 2-4 times a year. For fully distributed companies, you plan company wide events a few times a year to allow that face to face.
Taxes, housing, general expenses are all outrageous and do not often come with commensurate salary increases.
I personally will not move anywhere in CA due to a few of the things you've listed (NIMBYs, PC, CA political climate in general.)
Venture capital is about the only thing SF has that can't be found elsewhere.
As my boss(director level) at Reed Elsiver said if you have offices in the suburbs/boonies you don't get the best developers. Given the large number of disastrous projects we had to try and help recover Id agree with him.
On the other hand, I would like to see development of "minor" tech hubs in other more livable cities. I'd give anything to have access to SF-type employment in Chicago, as long as it didn't turn the Chicago housing market into SF's.
I've never seen pay properly compensate for the harsh (tangible) expenses of living in SF/CA.
Seattle, Austin, Boulder, in my experience, have all had far better value props.
> Chicago housing market into SF's
As much as I dislike Chicago (political reasons): SF-style-housing-market can't happen there. The city has massive amounts of sprawl, vehicular commuting is common, real estate is plentiful and inexpensive. It's not a peninsula full of NIMBYs.
Fortunately Chicago already has the CTA and Metra infrastructure, and we could presumably make trains longer (and run them more frequently) for a reasonable price. Though at some point you hit the limits of safe separation between trains and the inefficiencies of block signaling. CTA rail doesn't have the physical infrastructure to run express services (there are very few places where a train on a specific line can bypass another) so building more stations doesn't necessarily help you either.
If anything having core members in a tech hot spots is just asking them to move to another company when the mood suits them. Yeah you might miss out on some hot shots but you open the door to lose yours
If it really is rent costs, as techcrunch seems to suggest, then they could allow their more senior members in the SF office just work remotely.
Finally, if I were working for Lyft at this point, despite what department I may be in, I would be looking for a new job immediately as they have shown a complete lack of respect for the lives that their employees have and are building. This move has definitely tarnished their brand in my eyes and would make me question having them as a potential employer.
If I were working for Lyft, I'd be thinking about moving to Nashville. The cost of living is better and my money will go farther. There's also the whole not-in-a-drought thing. The move also shows me that the company has the insight to not run the company into the ground paying ghastly overhead prices in SF. (I'm not saying it won't run into the ground other ways, but at least it won't be by paying outlandish SF rent prices.)
The biggest let down to employees is running the company into the ground burning your money all the way. Good job Lyft!
It might not matter, but don't go into the South unless you understand that it's different in the Red State areas vs. the Blue.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/Uber-is-com...
No, probably totally unrelated.
I'm not surprised they let it stagnate. I use their instruments on our sailboat. They have an iPad app that works pretty well and integrates with our onboard navigation. But it is so limited compared to other navigation apps.
Lot of speculation, but, it's entirely plausible these employees will come out ahead in take-home pay. Their net worth will likely improve if this is the case (you can feasibly own property in Nashville.)
I would imagine they'll also come out ahead in quality of life.