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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

The only people still flogging "tech hub" cities are real estate companies stuck with trillions of dollars of unsaleable office space, teetering on the brink of total financial ruin after their calculated disaster-spending during COVID backfired spectacularly.

Folks like Richard Ellis and WeWork have every incentive to try and get someone, anyone, in tech to evangelize or at least attempt an acknowledgement of their slum-lord ant piles of dirt that have bled startups and established players alike for decades now.

WFH is here. its not going anywhere. the KPI's are real and established. its is a perk that snipes hot talent from places like Salesforce and Alphabet. It is, decidedly, to the encumbrance and disadvantage of commercial real estate and the octogenarian city councils that have gilded their pockets with daily commuters.

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> WFH is here. its not going anywhere.

I hope you're correct, but empirically this appears to be wishful thinking, at least among larger organizations. How many tech big-cos have implemented a mandatory return to office policy in some capacity? Some big ones off the top of my head: Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Snap. It's my observation that smaller companies tend to follow larger companies culturally, especially as they scale.

I would love to see how many other engineers want to live in non tier one metros. I’d be even more curious about a demographic breakdown. As a brown person, being in a non tier one has been uncomfortable.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/real-estate/our-insights...

> For example, the vast majority of employed people in computer and mathematical occupations report having remote-work options, and 77 percent report being willing to work fully remotely.

> Another of the survey’s revelations: when people have the chance to work flexibly, 87 percent of them take it. This dynamic is widespread across demographics, occupations, and geographies. The flexible working world was born of a frenzied reaction to a sudden crisis but has remained as a desirable job feature for millions. This represents a tectonic shift in where, when, and how Americans want to work and are working.

I can definitely understand your position with regards to wanting (rightfully demanding, even) to be treated respectably and with humanity and deceny where you live and work, but arguing SF is more accepting than all non top tier cities because of the political climate is a reach. There are plenty of non top tier cities tolerant of others.

That survey is not addressing the specific question sargun raised.

I'm happily 100% remote, working from the comfort of my SF home for a company based in NYC. I enjoy that being remote gives me control over my physical working environment (I don't have to constantly wear headphones in an open plan office, etc), and removes a commute from my daily schedule. I _also_ appreciate that SF is a dense city, where I can easily live without a car, use a relatively decent public transit system, where my dietary preferences are generally easily met, and where my race and sexual orientation are thoroughly unremarkable.

Fair, that data is hard to come by. We'll just need to see how fast SF degrows/outflows to know the scope of demand by the cohort sargun mentions unless someone wants to collect the data, run a poll, etc and see how many folks of that cohort will vote with their dollars to be in SF physically.

Is the startup ecosystem going to be able to pay enough to drag folks there in the current high benchmark rates for longer (perhaps forever?)? To be determined. YC has deep pockets [1], but you don't fight the Fed [2] [3].

[1] https://www.ycdb.co/top-companies/exit-value

[2] https://www.axios.com/2023/09/23/fed-interest-rates-venture-...

[3] https://www.axios.com/2023/09/21/fed-reserve-plan-inflation-...

What’s a recent successful startup that’s totally WFH? I’ve been hearing a lot about OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., but they’re all in-person.

Isn’t the more important question which successful startup only hires in-person in SF? I would guess most startups these days have distributed setups quite early.

Linear

Gitlab has been remote first since day one

Github went fully remote earlier this year[0] (while not a startup, worth noting IMO)

Close (CRM)

Zapier (if I recall correctly)

Sourcegraph

Timescale

Supabase

I'm sure there's more

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/09/github-lays-off-10-and-goe...

Dropbox: https://jobs.dropbox.com/blogs/virtual-first-best-perk

Airbnb: https://www.airbnb.com/d/liveandworkanywhere

EDIT: Automattic, Buffer

Respectfully, those aren't startups. They built their products in person.

That's a reasonable rebuttal. I suppose the crux of the argument is, "Can a startup become a billion dollar company fully remote?" Cleary, the answer to that is yes (Zapier, Hashicorp, Gitlab [two out of three which have IPOd, and all three are collectively worth >$10B]). So what's the rebuttal to that? So what? Office would be better? If so, bring the data and show that. Otherwise, it's an argument from emotion, PR, controlling the narrative, whatever, and not data driven.

Some of us actually like working in person. I'm much more productive in the office, and I think many other people are too.

I can buy the real estate argument to some degree, but it just isn't as simple as a giant conspiracy to get everyone back in a box so they can monitor us.

But the money and the incentives are real. You don't need a conspiracy if the incentives... well incentivize a certain type of behaviour.

No it's a conspiracy to get everyone back into the office so they don't lose their asses on properties they've purchased.

In every poll I've seen done in my friend group's companies, the vast majority prefer work from home.

WFH is not here. There are still a ton of new and laid off developers who need jobs.

WFH jobs are now only a tiny percentage of job listings. Remote work seems to be going away for the most part, unless you're in the upper echelon of devs at FAANG

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