Comment by alexhutcheson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexhutcheson | Hacker News Reader

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Moving offices is really disruptive to people's lives, and causes a huge amount of turnover in your workforce. A brief excerpt from Peopleware[1]:

"The typical person being moved today is part of a two-career family. The other half of that equation is probably not being moved, so the corporate move comes down hard on the couple’s relationship at a very delicate point. It brings intolerable stress to bear on the accommodation they’re both striving to achieve to allow two full-fledged careers. That’s hitting below the belt. Modern couples won’t put up with it and they won’t forgive it. The company move might have been possible in the 1950s and 1960s. Today it is folly."

They also cite a case study of a major project at Bell Labs which was moved from New Jersey to Illinois. The authors interviewed the former manager of that project:

"I asked him what he saw as his main successes and failures as boss. “Forget the successes,” he said. “The failure was that move. You can’t believe what it cost us in turnover.” He went on to give some figures. The immediately calculable cost of the move was the number of people who quit before relocation day. Expressed as a percentage of those moved, this initial turnover was greater than the French losses in the trenches of World War I."

(FWIW, that's just one of many insights from that book - I highly recommend it.)

[1] https://amazon.com/dp/B00DY5A8X2/

That's all true, but assumes a quick move.

A move strategy could be as simple as, opening up an office in a cheaper location:

1. New teams are created at the new location.

2. New hires on existing teams are placed at the new location, with exceptions if teams have a strong need to be in the same place.

3. Make it clear that you'll help people relocate to the new office if they choose to--some people will take you up on it.

Eventually, the original office will shrink and remaining staff can be allowed to work remotely (which should be a big part of a culture anyway, IMO).

Turnover is already high at tech companies, but in this case your turnover facilitates the move--as people leave at the old location you replace them at the new one. There will still likely be some turnover caused by even the slow move, but that turnover already exist with any move--even the move to south SF will probably cause some turnover because the location is just less convenient for some people.

Any examples of a big company actually doing a gradual move this way? It doesn't seem like it would work.

Satellite offices are tough to do right. It's very hard to build trust between individuals at the different offices without regular face-to-face contact. In the absence of this, you end up with negative relationships between teams at different sites: "The team in Springfield doesn't care about quality" vs. "Those Shelbyville engineers are always dragging their feet and never launch anything". Communication bandwidth between sites is also much more limited - you need to minimize how much a team at site A needs to communicate with teams at site B to get their job done.

Another issue is how to get the satellite office going from a cold start. Do you re-assign projects that are already being worked on in your existing office? Most of those employees aren't going to move, and they're going to be upset that their project was yanked away from them. You've also set the project up for failure because everyone on the new team has to ramp up on the necessary domain knowledge from scratch. So you think "Ok, I'll leave existing projects at the current office and start new efforts at the new office." Now you have an office exclusively working on things that were deemed to be either too low-value or too risky to work on before - not a recipe for success.

Leadership is another major issue. If your senior leadership moves to the new office, they're going to be constantly flying to the larger original office to supervise things there. More realistically, they're going to stay in place, because their time is better spent at the bigger office. This creates problems as leaders move up the ranks at the satellite office, because eventually they hit a point where their career stalls unless they move to the "head office". Teams at the "head office" are at a permanent advantage in project selection, etc. due to proximity to senior leadership.

In short, it's not as easy as your list makes it sound, and it's particularly difficult to grow a satellite office to a similar scale as the original office.

Almost every successful medium- or large-sized company has done this. As they grow, they open new offices, which they seed with existing staff who are willing to either permanently or temporarily relocate. Most of the time those offices have specific areas of focus, at least when they're starting out. That way they minimize cross-geographic dependencies. To pick a totally non-random example, Stripe has followed this model. It's evident when one looks at their job listings: https://stripe.com/jobs/search

By growing any one of their regional offices, they could move their headquarters. Toyota recently did this over the course of several years. They announced the relocation in 2014, but didn't officially move the HQ until 2016. The planning and execution spanned years before and after that timeframe as well.

Yeah, I specifically meant the "grow a new satellite office into a new HQ" transition. I know companies open satellite offices all the time, but moving your HQ to one of them is much less common.

They did it, and they lost 25% of their of employees doing so: https://jalopnik.com/toyota-loses-25-percent-of-its-american...

A sizable portion of that 25% were people who decided to retire (early), but yeah...it was massively expensive. They also offered very, very generous moving packages to everyone who did relocate along with early retirement packages for those who stayed.

Lots in the financial industry over the last 3 years in London, due to Brexit. Soft moves by letting one office shrink due to natural decline from people moving on and not rehiring in that office, but in another elsewhere.

Bay Area companies are actively trying to do this. Stripe's Remote HQ is an example, but so are the emerging second HQs in Seattle. But the fact remains that there is a huge glut of talent in the Bay Area, and if you want to recruit from the FB/Apple/GOOG HQs, you need a strong Bay Area presence.

There're network effects between teams in a big company just like there're network effects between startups in a big city.

As others have mentioned, the big tech companies are all actively doing this. Nevertheless, it's not really taking. I know 3 people who moved from Google's NYC office (the 2nd largest) to Mountain View because all the top-priority projects were in Mountain View. As a general rule of thumb, you want to be where the executives are, and the executives are going to be at headquarters because a.) that's where their home is and b.) that's where all their most productive people are.

There's a steady conveyor belt where young single folks move from satellite offices to headquarters when they want to advance their career and then older folks move to satellite offices when they have kids, to be with their families or enjoy a better quality of life. This is healthy in the sense of maximizing happiness for everyone, but it means that the most ambitious, highest priority projects and most talented people are going to cluster at headquarters.

(As a side note, I feel like not enough people understand that the cost-of-living in SF is an effect of the wealth that's been brought into the area by the tech industry, and isn't just a random fluctuation. If some other metro area suddenly had a large concentration of successful companies that paid high wages, the cost of living would go up there too, until COL-adjusted salaries equalized peoples' preferences for living there.)

A side not to your side note, I think you’re only half right. zoning and nimby-ism are largely creating artificial scarcity in terms of housing supply. SF cost of living gets squeezed on the supply side and demand side. If some other metro area got hit with high demand, presumably it would not have the issue creating supply that SF faces, and thus overall COL wouldn’t be as high.

This is an excellent summary of the situation, and reflects on my own career path. I moved from Austin to SF cuz I'm not-married and thus can keep my COL reasonably low while working on high impact, high visibility and frankly, high fun projects. But, its not a lifestyle I would want to keep when I will get married and have kids... a less demanding job + lower COL seems incredibly reasonable to me.

> That's all true, but assumes a quick move.

Or a required move.

Isn't South San Francisco just 10 miles from San Francisco?

For some cities this would equate to moving to another part of the same city.

South SF is far less accessible than Stripe's current location in Townsend St (Soma, SF).

I'm curious to see how many people leave because of this move. Tech workers in SF tend to live in Soma or the surrounding neighborhoods (FiDi, Mission, Dogpatch), which means for a worker without a car, their commute was previously a short bike, Muni, or Uber Pool, whereas to get to SSF they'll be looking at this (to get to a BART station), a BART ride, and probably a shuttle at the far end, because Oyster Point isn't near transit.

I worked for a company that moved its HQ (due to an acquisition) to Brisbane -- slightly closer than South SF -- and ended up buying a car to commute, because the walk + BART + shuttle combination took so long.

This. The major reason why I live in SOMA, and put up with all the significant downsides of that neighborhood, is because it means my commute is very short. It also means I have significant job and networking opportunities within a 30 minute _walk_ from home.

When I was last looking for a new role, I didn't even consider anything outside of SF.

I mulled over this for a while and figured that I should be grateful.

This whole situation appears to be lifting IT salaries all over the world. I'm currently in the middle of switching jobs and found that I sneer at positions that pay less than ~$50k (in Poland at that) or don't offer fully remote work.

So, I guess, thank you?

Polska! I am Polish (3rd gen removed) and was recently in Krakow for a work/fun trip and fantasized about moving there for a year or so and working remote for a while to learn the language and explore the country. Could keep my Bay Area salary as long as kept US hours for conference calls etc. We hire remote IT as well- lmk if you're interested in connecting!

Sure - how can I reach you?

If you want to reach me try:

hand at wringing.it

My GitHub handle is the same as my HN handle.

Hey! I'm in Krakow, personally I'm React/C# guy, buy have couple Java friends that would love to work fully remotely. Can give you my contact www if ur willing to network

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