I rarely see needles unless I get pho in the Tenderloin, which is the neighborhood that some people seem to think is the only one in the city. SF is the most beautiful city I’ve lived in by a mile.
My SO works at Twitter and was shocked to see journalists say they were permanently WFH. What Dorsey actually said was that if managers approve certain roles can stay remote, but most managers plan to bring teams back to the office, with 2-3 day WFH being the most popular option.
Rents went down downtown, because everything is closed. It’s a huge leap to assume that will stick and rents are still astronomical given everything is closed.
I can’t tell you the reason, but people are just obsessed with this “end of San Francisco” narrative despite a ton of hard evidence to the contrary. I studied CS after the dotcom and people were convinced all programming jobs were going abroad since programming can be done anywhere, instead Bay Area engineering comp quadrupled. Now instead of going to Mumbai it’s going to Denver or Montana, doubtful.
People saw companies like Reddit, Yahoo, and Twitter lay off all their remote workers. They saw Googlers in MTV get the most promotions. There is understands skepticism “this time is different.”
It’s funny how there are so many articles about how Silicon Valley is leaving the Bay Area but not a single one about how Wall Street is leaving New York. People just get hung up on “code monkey work can be done anywhere “ and ride the media wave. There’s been a tech bubble waiting to pop and an exodus from Bay Area for 10 years now, in the minds of journalists and the blogosphere. In the real world, not so much.