Yelp CEO responds to employee's open letter about low wages

moving to less expensive neighborhood is not an option anymore?

"We didn't fire her because of the letter" ... yet the same night she wrote the letter she is suddenly fired?? C'mon...

Not my company, but our very similar competitor in SF is moving their call center operations to Reno. I saw they were hiring for my specific job in Reno, at a 20% salary cut. I was tempted, very tempted... I'm sure the COL is so much cheaper there I would come out ahead, and those ski seasons...

Anyway, I thought it was a smart move of them to move their call center operations to Reno, we pay our reps $20 an hour, I bet they can get away with paying their reps $10 or $13 up there, not to mention how much they'll be saving on rent. Also the exec team etc can easily drive or fly up to Reno if needed.

Wonder if they'll have any problems staffing up there?

It's bizarre to me to imagine a city without entry-level jobs. I understand why this is the right business decision (well, except that I still don't understand why programmers need to be physically located in SF), but the resulting city seems extremely confusing. If you grow up in the city, do you move to another city to get a job? If you're designing systems for EAT24, and (your company belives that) in-person contact is needed to understand things, do you not get to understand how some of your employees work and how the systems you build impact them?

> While Tech has ALL the disruption like Uber, where is the one for property market? ... 3D Printing that print GREAT quality houses in cheap and fast way

The cost to build a house is relatively cheap -- that's not the problem. The critical factor in housing prices is location.

In the case of SF/SV, it's a desirable place with limited housing supply. Techies, startups, tech corporations, and VCs have all convinced themselves that they need to be crammed into a tiny geographic area to thrive. This, coupled with relatively high wages, has driven up rents and home prices.

I imagine many of us assumed that tech would prevent this situation, by building faster, more reliable communication networks. Yet tech in SFBA wound up as a concentrated, insular industry (second, perhaps, to finance in NYC).

It wouldn't matter since land is a commodity vs something like uber which is a service. No matter how cheap you make the structures, the land prices will skyrocket to anything a bank will give a loan for under demand.

The only solution is what some execs are already doing. Taking fiscally impossible problems out of the equation and moving operations elsewhere.