Previously from @sama: "Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I’m excited to watch it play out. " (http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit)
With ~sama's revelation that Wong preferred a Daly City HQ, the battle-lines could have been:
Pro-Daly-City: "more space, cheaper, less-cool, longer-runway, more employees who've self-selected for willingness to do Reddit muckwork vs. glamorous SoMa networking, outsider perspective"
Pro-SF: "continuity with current employees, top talent prefers SF, worth the extra cost/cost-of-living, more transit links, closer to other media/advertising"
My company is in SoMa, and recruiting is not super easy, I'm confident if someone really wanted to work at Heap, they'd work in Daly City or Sunnyvale. Location has never been a great selling point.
Maybe there is a certain kind of candidate for whom not being in the city is a dealbreaker, but I'd like to see numbers.
That's not to say that this isn't a common and seemingly true myth of recruiting, but it would be interesting to be able to dispel or confirm it.
I do it once a week and, starting driving at 7:05 AM from San Mateo, it takes until 8am or just before to get into soma. Leaving at 8-9 would take longer.
See also: Google, Apple, Facebook, et al running comfy buses for SF residents to their distant HQs.
And now the Reddit board is another data point. They didn't trust their CEO's call, unless they got more proof about employee retention after choosing a non-SF location.
It's young / youngish single people who are willing to kill their bodies with insane hours at the office that most startups are after.
Those people are generally in SF, or at least the kind of people who can actually afford to live in SF on ~$100k.
Almost all corporate HQ relocations move closer to the CEO's home.
But also, there's a (plausibly-fair) knock on SF-city-based companies as being more superficial, frothier, and more prone to distraction and high-burn rates than those in the more-authentically-nerdy Valley.
Maybe someone can leak where Wong wanted the new HQ to be.
Is there any evidence of that? Seems quite interesting..
The ~cschmidt sibling reply highlights a Joel-on-Software post about the phenomenon from 2003, attributed to a 20th-century urbanist/organizational-analyst, William Whyte, perhaps as coined in a 1958 book.
Here's a critique of a Connecticut tax incentive from earlier this year that notes all 5 resulting corporate relocations reduced their CEO's commute:
http://www.raisinghale.com/2014/07/16/connecticut-taxpayers-...
Sam himself obliges: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604199
From the NYT: "That incident, according to people close to the company, made some of Reddit’s current employees uncomfortable."
He also publicly spoke out about someone's work ethic and performance of which we're only getting one side of the story anyway. If his real name is associated with his reddit profile then future employers will see the CEO of a public internet company lambasting him. Whether it's deserved or not at the time is irrelevant; there are plenty of people who, for one reason or another, do terrible at a job and later are highly valued. This could ruin any attempt at redemption.
I call it "thinking with your tattoos". People simply aren't cognizant that decisions and actions have long-term consequences. You may really want that tattoo on your face, but it will make you virtually unemployable for the rest of your life. They're simply unable to project out complex interactions of consequences, their brain simply can't do the calculus or views it as overstimulus or something simply filters out everything to do with long-term planning and executive function.
In the U.S. it does, since untruth is a required element of libel.
The employer would have to prove it's true in a suit hence my comment. Paper trails are king.
Companies have to act and usually act quickly, handling a public issue privately, no matter how successfully, would leave a lingering impression of "Yahoo hires just about anyone with a fake diploma" or "Uber drivers beat up passengers with hammers as often as they please".
The response lacks all proportionality. A former employee is saying mildly critical things about you in a public forum? Ok, I don't think anyone is really going to mistake that kind of rumormongering for gospel. Destroying that person's future employment prospects from on high is not only unnecessarily cruel, it also creates a story where there wasn't one before. We never would have heard about the thread if he hadn't done this. It certainly never would have made the mainstream news.
He could have said nothing. He could have sent the employee a private legal warning. Or he could have posted a nice non-response to indicate that they saw the thread, but as a company staffed by adults Reddit is above that kind of name-calling. He did the opposite and looked like a child.
In addition to being really poor form, his response very likely opens the company up to a lawsuit. If I were the besmirched fired employee, god forbid, I would immediately be contacting an employment attorney.
The CEO has a right-of-reply and a duty to protect the reputation of the company against accusations, and he fairly exercised that right.
There was no slanging match, and the response consisted of a single post amongst hundreds in that thread.
I don't see a problem with having both positions made public after the ex-employee initiated the public confrontation. As always The truth is probably going to lie somewhere in the middle.
Sounds like he didn't give any notice at all, and they had to scramble for a new CEO? Is resigning (or being fired?) with no notice typical for CEO positions?
I would be really disappointed if a CEO left day-of rather than at least allow a transition period where a lead investor didn't have to step in. (Unless it was the board that wanted him gone asap?)