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Comment by wyclif | Hacker News Reader

I could write yet another boring comment about how hypocritical and stupid longtime SF residents are because they complain about rising housing costs or being priced out while simultaneously voting to prevent more housing from being built, but I'd rather ask a serious question:

Why do all these Bay-area startups and tech juggernaughts insist that all of their employees squeeze into housing on the peninsula? Of course many of their employees are going to have to work in SF but why is it so impossible to conceive of having a distributed, remote employee base? There are many successful tech companies (and YC startups) that have done this. It would ease the pressure on housing supply/demand, and also make salaries more attractive since engineers would be paid an SF salary but have more earning power by living outside the bubble.

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> but why is it so impossible to conceive of having a distributed, remote employee base? There are many successful tech companies (and YC startups) that have done this.

And there are some that are even trying to solve that problem by making it easier to remote, like ours (Floobits), and our YC competitors: Screen Hero, Hackpad, Sqwiggle. So there are a lot of options for making remoting easier. I know Zapier has a remote team and those guys are doing fantastic. At Floobits we're entirely remote. And really working from home is the best work experience I've ever had, I don't ever want to have to commute back to SF (I live in the east bay). I've been taking and picking up my daughter from school , I've taken her to the library once a week ever since and I've gone to all her ballet lessons with her. Something I couldn't do when I worked in SF.

I hate that every day working people are priced out of their city, and a socially conscious company could consider remoting as a solution. Good for the community, good for their employees and good for the company.

The companies move to where the good employees want to live so that they can hire and retain good employees. I hope that explains that for you.

The alternative proposed was "distributed, remote employee base", which - if it worked - would let you hire and retain good employees wherever they wanted to live (even if they didn't all want to live near each other). So your explanation alone doesn't address the issue.

There are plenty of reasons not to do the alternative. Are we now going to iterate them and iterate counter-reasons and such and such? It's a waste of time.

There are doubtless plenty of reasons, but discussing them would seem to be substantially less a waste of time than answering obvious questions that weren't asked. Particularly since at least one person doesn't seem to understand them.

Which came first? Do people want to be in SF - or are they there because there are jobs?

Anecdotal, but I know people who live in SF who would rather be back in Myrtle Beach, SC - as soon as there's a similar opportunity or a remote work opportunity for them.

The quality of life and work-life balance is not in SF for them.

wyclif: I agree that more companies will solve this problem with distributed, remote teams - which is what we're leveraging to attract those folks to the Beach. http://WhyNotTheBeach.com

Funny to see this post pop up in a thread about how dysfunctional SF city government is. Myrtle Beach is effectively governed by an oligarchy of property development families.

I've never lived in either city, but while I've certainly heard a fair bit about San Francisco's idiosyncrasies, I have basically no impression of Myrtle Beach at all. In your estimation, what aspects of MB are as bad as the complaints I see about SF, and how do those stem from the governance model you describe?

This is a terrible question so I'm not going to answer it, but if you are interested in reading about the corrupt history of Myrtle Beach (and the greater Grand Strand area) I strongly recommend Will Murdock's Banana Republic: A Year in the Heart of Myrtle Beach. http://www.amazon.com/Banana-Republic-Heart-Myrtle-Beach/dp/...

Well, no, I'm not actually interested enough to do the homework you've assigned me. I guess I'll just have to take your unsupported assertions about Myrtle Beach at face value.

It doesn't explain that at all. Not all of the "good employees" want to live in SF, especially if they want to own a home or have children. The point is that it's not necessary to ask people to live in places where there's all this stress surrounding finding a place to live, finding a good school for your kid, and having a decent quality of life.

I'm not sure the companies moving there think "good employees" can want to own a home or have children.

Hypothetically, if they could move/live wherever they wanted, what percentage of the people who live in SF/SV would choose to leave? Are we saying none or something trival like 5% or 10%?

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