It sounds like a clumsy PR play tbh.
San Francisco is not a large city at all. It's 7 miles by 7 miles. There are not a lot of areas where you can rent a single office large enough to hold all of Kraken's employees, and most of those are in what is now a high crime area downtown and in SOMA.
It's also still very expensive to rent compared to other nearby cities and suburbs (somehow), and has extra payroll taxes levied on large employers.
I'm not surprised at all that yet another large tech company is abandoning the city. There are many other areas, even nearby, that are far cheaper and where employees can come to work every day without fearing for their lives.
If you’re on the fence about going remote, the crime hassles could push you over the top in a way that wouldn’t pre-COVID.
Are we ignoring the past 20 years of startups and major tech companies attracting high level of talent to SF? Because pre pandemic it was very, very easy to attract workers, very expensive workers, to move to SF despite all of its issues. Every few years we’d have these discussions, and yet major startups and FAANGs would keep hiring there.
I think remote is an issue for SF, but it is also worth pointing out that remote work is extremely popular outside SF too. $CORP is really struggling to get on site workers across a variety of cities where satellite offices exist, and not just CA cities either. My feel is that this is a general cultural change across the industry, and maybe SF is a bit more affected because it’s so much more expensive than other metro areas.
My guess is that like a ton of other tech companies, they were either losing staff to remote jobs, or having a hard time justifying having an office when a large percentage of their work force didn’t come in, and this is how they decided to spin the PR.
1. It wasn't as bad before. Some areas were, but the zone of insanity has grown and worse behavior is being tolerated now.
2. There was a lot more people around which made the problems less visually severe
3. There was a lively "scene". Events, experiences, dinners, whatever. Stuff was happening all the time for techies.
Now it's a lot less vibrant. SF's insistence on masks, tests, and vaccines to the very end guaranteed that normal social behavior wouldn't come back. And, surprise, it didn't! All of the people who live for that stuff and organize it... moved away!
On top of that, SF was drunk on power and money in 2019 and implemented all manner of taxes to punish tech companies. Well, the tech companies now have their options and they aren't choosing the jurisdiction that hates them.
I don't expect that SF will return to its peak 2019 level of hegemony at any point prior to a political and social revolution in the town.
My eyes were opened when I went to Manhattan last summer and found it way safer and nicer than San Francisco. Finally getting out.
It really is that bad.
1) The city worsened.
2) Companies got better at working remote.
3) The pool of talent outside the Bay Area grew as folks skipped town.
I don't think this is the straw that broke the camel's back, but costs have only gone up for residents and employers, while benefits to being SF based have generally decreased.
>my guess is that like a ton of other tech companies, they were either losing staff to remote jobs, or having a hard time justifying having an office when a large percentage of their work force didn’t come in, and this is how they decided to spin the PR.
I imagine this specific case is a conflux of all the issues. If the office was a pretty 5 minute walk from cheap housing, I doubt they would be having trouble getting in-office workers.
That’s a much more nuanced way of putting it, I agree completely.
I'd be really surprised if you told me you live in SF. Getting screamed at as you're walking through the Financial District during working hours on a weekday is commonplace. Feces is commonplace. Maybe you've heard of the Tenderloin and how bad it is? That's almost adjacent to the FiDi.
Add to the fact that these things, plus the move towards WFH coupled with insane housing costs, are driving large numbers of workers out of SF, and why wouldn't a company move out? They'd probably put up with the crime if they still had to be there in order to attract top-tier talent, but once the talent leaves, there's no point in staying, enduring harrassment and the smell of urine and feces, and paying sky-high rents.
[Q] https://seattlemedium.com/amazon-relocates-workers-due-to-cr...
With regard to things getting worse over the past couple years, I'm not sure what people were expecting to happen when sky high rents intersected with a global pandemic, especially in places where there's not much of a safety net.
And that narrative is now having some success. It is getting people to apply a confirmation bias such that they perceive their city as crime-infested.
Meanwhile, crime statistics in many (most? all?) of these cities are actually down or flat. And compared on a per-capita basis look like even weaker support for that narrative.
Crime is up in a lot of cities, example of a recent study in Denver, sure it depends on what you measure and how, but that is how statistics work:
- While Colorado’s rates for homicide, aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft rose by more than 10% in 2020 over the average of the prior three years, rates for rape, larceny, robbery and burglary stayed relatively level or declined.
- Increases in aggravated assaults — which include shootings and stabbings — and motor vehicle thefts are the biggest drivers of increased rates statewide of violent crime and property crime.
- Colorado’s communities are not a monolith. Trends in the state’s largest cities differ from each other, as do those in medium-sized towns. Colorado’s 2020 violent crime rate was the highest it’s been since 1995, but is lower than it was between 1985 and 1995. The state’s 2020 property crime rate was the highest recorded since 2008, but is less than half the rate recorded in the mid-1980s.
- While Colorado’s violent crime rate jumped 10% between 2019 and 2020 — the largest single-year increase since 1990 — that increase came as part of a six-year upward trend. The state’s violent crime rate increased by 8% year-over-year in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
Or police are actively making the cities worse places to live as a way of punishing people with these attitudes.
I guess we'll find out when departments slip up and put into writing policies that were previously said behind closed doors.
You may want to check into this a bit more. As with anything it's much more complicated than that. For example, have the Seattle "police" been defunded? In late 2020, the Seattle City Council cut less than $10M off the specific police budget, with funds specifically allocated for adding 125 officers. Meanwhile they budgeted $100M MORE for additional community safety initiatives (see https://crosscut.com/news/2020/11/seattle-cuts-doesnt-defund...).
Every time there was discussion of anything like "police reform" the past two years in Seattle, the Seattle Times ran an article with a headline like "Seattle City Council defunds police" and you would read the article and find that nothing had even changed, but that the council had just issued a statement of support for the idea of reform.
This is the kind of spin/propaganda that is happening.