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Comment by kasey_junk | Hacker News Reader

Stripe has offices in lots of places. But they also have their existing employees in San Francisco.

Fucking off to another city is functionally equivalent to laying off half the company.

Boeing moved, many companies based in NYC moved out of the city in the 80s, 90s. It’s not extremely hard, but it is disruptive. When the exodus happens it’ll start as a trickle and by the time people take notice half the cos will have reduced occupancy.

After certain stage it’s more about managing growth than about R&D, so you can find most of the talent you need in alternate markets.

In all fairness, significant HQ moves often have a major cut in headcount as a well-understood side effect if not an actual motivation.

But, yes, companies can and have moved their HQs a lot more than ten miles. It's probably harder in an industry and at a time when more people figure a job with a given company is pretty ephemeral though.

Maybe but I think people will figure out the talent deserts have more oases than people think. There are more options for talent than just SV. Remember much of the US talent in SV come from other parts of the country. Many would stay local if given the opp to stay local. So instead of drawing talent to SV, SV could seek the talent in those markets (where talent is growing).

Maybe people in the abstract would, but at the level of individual people and companies talent isn’t fungible. If Stripe were to lose 100 senior engineers in a move to Salt Lake City, but could pick up 110 new ones at 90% of the price, it’s not obvious that would be a net win.

Not in that year, but long term it can be a win (obviously depending on their goals).

One perspective is that the exchange permanently hamstrings the company. You spent let's say 3 years on average, training those engineers to be the best people in the world at solving Stripe's problems, but now they're gone with (unless you're gonna do double payroll for a while) only an arms-length handoff to the new staff. That's 300 person-years of training, gone forever. Arguably even worse, it propagates upwards; there will be some number of valuable, important projects which can no longer get done because the needed expertise was lost.

Well, one option is to keep key people who don’t want to move remote and then through turnover replace them with new talent just as if the company had stayed. It’s not like key engs stay forever.

Oh I agree with all that. I don't live in SV/SF myself and have no real interest in doing so. But so many people have the attitude that you can't have a tech career if you don't live in SV that it would probably be difficult for an existing company to move out of the area without losing a lot of people (or at least letting them work remote).

It is not about an oasis, it is about top of the funnel. To hire 1 eng, you have to interview 5-10, and have to phone screen 20-30, and have have hacker rank tested 100-200. Now scale that to a 1000 person eng team

Thing is that top of the funnel is not composed of majority local people. Many are people who relocated and many are people who are not local now but if hired the company would move them. If they can move them to SF they can also move them to another major tech oriented city.

That may be true but plenty of companies around the world that are nowhere near California somehow manage to hire technical talent. The Bay area has a higher density than many places but there's more competition for hiring too.

I feel like Boeing has far more of a monopoly on hiring the kind of talent they need than Stripe. They also seem like a place that has more "lifers".

Stripe engineers can just say "no thanks" and go work for SF company n+1 down the road. Does Boeing have competition in the same city that could reasonably hire Boeing knowledge workers? Honest question.

There are a few in the Puget Sound such as Blue Origin, Collins Aerospace, SpaceX and some other smaller ones. Your point is valid though.

> many companies based in NYC moved out of the city in the 80s, 90s.

This is the story of most American cities in the 80s and 90s, thankfully it has had some reversal this century, and I'm not sure it should be seen as a template or justification for present or future actions.

While the reasons may be different now, the process of relocating is going to be similar. Some staff will like it, some will resign, some will go with reservations, etc. and, with today’s communications this will be even easier.

Boeing moved their Corporate HQ, specifically the executive team. Their BU headquarters remained in the same locations.

Boeing's move seems to be working well for them.

Something companies will do to reset their salaries.

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