Hacker News Reader

Comment by PopeDotNinja | Hacker News Reader

I can tell you recruiting for South San Francisco was way harder than recruiting for SF. If I lived in SF without a car, that'd be a deal breaker for me. They're going to start losing people, or see a huge spike in chronic working from home. I guess they have to move somewhere at some point, and no move is without trade-offs.

Regarding the gross receipts tax, couldn't they just move their HQ-on-paper to any place that doesn't have a gross receipts tax?

View on HN

The law has you pay taxes of 1% of gross revenue * percentage of global employees working in an SF office. Even if the headquarters moved (and I'd guess it is already a Delaware registered company legally), they'd still have to pay.

Wouldn't this allow another tax dodge, where hiring employees to do nothing in the lowest-cost area you can find winds up saving more money in SF gross receipts taxes than they cost in salary?

For example, if you have $10M/yr in tax incidence and 100 employees all in SF, you could have an on-paper workforce of 1000 Nigerians at the national median wage of roughly $1k/yr, saving $9M/yr in taxes.

It's based on payroll cost (including non-cash compensation), not headcount.

I'd say that's an exaggeration. I know tons of people who commute from the city to south bay and vice versa. Plus South SF is pretty well connected by transit.

I've never heard anyone in SF say that South San Francisco is well connected by transit before. BART takes a rather circuitous route to get to the city's western edge and most Caltrain service skips its (rather sad) station.

Is that the station where you might exit onto the tracks of an oncoming (but waiting) train?

It is. They have a holdout rule though, trains only pull into the station and open their doors when the track is clear for obvious reasons.

I live in SF next to a muni station and to get there I would need to take the muni, then the bart, then the bus. For a total of one hour at least. Driving in no traffic would get me there in 20min.

Same, but from my SF house it'd be 1:40 by public, and at least 30min driving. They're lucky that commuting anywhere in SF tends to suck.

No where in the Bay Area is ‘well connected’ by any kind of transit.

Getting to downtown SF isn't too bad if you optimize for it, but in general I agree that getting around takes quite a while.

Not if you live in Sunset or the Richmond.

Stripe is already a pretty remote friendly company no?

Yes, to a very large extent

Google Maps tells me this is a 14 minute drive (old HQ to Oyster Point Park). 16-30 minutes if you want to arrive at 8am. Is that correct? Is that such a game changer? Do that many people not own vehicles or can't carpool to work?

It's a major problem if you don't already commute by car, which is a lot of the City. Don't forget that driving to HQ often is slower than however people currently get there.

When I commuted into the Stripe office by car from Oakland, it would take me about 45 minutes to get there, and well over 60 minutes to get home. With this move, you can add about 30 minutes, at least, on to each end. And that's on a good day and assuming you are already commuting by car.

From Oakland/the East Bay, there is no good way to get to South San Francisco by public transportation. You are looking at a 2+ hour commute in each direction to go < 15 miles

>From Oakland/the East Bay, there is no good way to get to South San Francisco by public transportation.

Is the ferry considered public transportation? I don't live in the area at all, so I'm just poking around on Google Maps to see what the situation is like, so I'm geniuingly asking.

Yup, lots of people ride the ferry.

Google maps work commute estimates in CA are not accurate at all. Probably looking at 30-45mins during rush hour which would be soul crushing if you've previously fought 20 other applicants for a year long lease at a place in walking distance of the old HQ

I work in CA and the estimates are usually accurate to ±10%. There are some rare exceptions for rapidly evolving situations.

Of course, if you do a driving estimate outside of commute hours, it won't match a commute time estimate, in many places.

Where are you guys living that you have to fight 20 people for a lease?

San Francisco is not an easy place to get an affordable apartment, especially one that is located near work and/or good public transportation options.

They'll probably just start running shuttle buses, like every other big company with offices outside the city. It will be a bigger problem for employees who live in the East Bay, but not near the ferry terminals.

It's a fairly easy commute from the city in my experience. BART -> Millbrae or Balboa Park + 15 minute shuttle to the office. Just about every company in SSF that I saw offers some sort of shuttle, and I was at a startup with a much lower cap.

even better: it was mostly against traffic == half empty train (as of 2 years ago). makes the commute sooo much nicer, both ways. felt comfortable enough to get work done on the way in, and read a book on the way back.

First thing I ask recruiters is the actual street address for companies they want me to be passionate about.

If a company has multiple locations in the bay area, I already know the San Francisco location is not headquarters and I'm not interested.

This is mainly for leadership roles, companies always find it more practical for any lead to be at HQ compared to their trendy satellite/remote experiment.

I'm curious about it. But there must be something illegal about the mismatch between where most employees are located and the hq location.

> But there must be something illegal about the mismatch between where most employees are located and the hq location.

How would that be illegal? Employers can't tell employees where to live, and a law that told them to do that is insane, even compared to other crazy laws of the Bay Area.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com