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Comment by onewaystreet | Hacker News Reader

Wong didn't want to move the company to SF. The board did. That's no small thing to disagree on.

I could absolutely believe that, and if it's the case that's what should have been said, not some technically-correct-but-obviously-downplayed pablum that insults the intelligence of every reader.

The disagreement about "location and amount of money to spend on a lease" sounds like code for "disagreement on whether we need an SF office big enough to consolidate all our remote workers or not."

This is 100% not true. Yishan wanted the team to move to the same location and the board supported him. This was a question of office location, not centralizing.

What about the office location was so contentious that the CEO would quit?

Generally such a resignation is about being-overruled (board no-confidence), rather than just the particulars of one decision.

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"

It would be interesting if startups would get together and do some real analysis on location.

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 live in the peninsula and you would have to be my dream job to get me to drive to soma regularly.

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.

I don't drive. I caltrain. Train at least gives some alone time to get work done, the main issue is it restricts your schedule if you want to take fast trains. I train from Sunnyvale every day.

Do you have anything to support your claim that top talent prefers SF? Just curious.

Someone's paying the sky-high residential rents; it sure seems like it's top-compensated tech workers.

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.

The top talent you describe is highly unlikely to take what is almost certainly an inferior compensation package at Reddit as compared with places their talents will be better recognized (financially), if compensation sufficient to rent in S.F. is a concern for them.

Yes, SF is crazy expensive and it makes effective compensation smaller. Still knowing that, companies choose to locate here, companies send buses here to help hire San Franciscans, and Reddit's board feared that an HQ move to a neighboring city would lose employees. Those are all strong indicators that desired talent likes to be in SF.

It's not necessarily top talent.

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.

It seems to me that Daly City would be more sensible and/or comforting for the people that are being forced to relocate from locales such as Salt Lake City. That's something that hasn't really been brought up in this thread; maybe it was seen as a compromise for the people that are being forced to relocate. And maybe the board was opposed because they wanted to use the opportunity to cull the "wrong type" of employee from reddit, i.e., the type that prefers the suburb to the urb. Just some cynical speculation with absolutely no data behind it; just wanted to throw out the possibility that Daly City is probably more familiar to SLC folks than SF.

Many of the SLC employees are moving to the East Bay.

Maybe I'm missing the context here, but Reddit is in San Francisco. They're in the same SoMa office building Wired is in.

Yes, the context is that it used to be a somewhat remote team and when the latest round of funding was raised everyone outside of SF was essentially forced to move to San Francisco.

Okay, thanks. (I'm not really sure why someone's downvoted me for asking the question; it's not like I said "ha ha, OP is stupid for saying this." I was, in fact, missing context.)

Maybe Wong wanted to move HQ to the Valley proper, rather than SF itself?

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.

> Almost all corporate HQ relocations move closer to the CEO's home.

Is there any evidence of that? Seems quite interesting..

Apparently that is William Whyte's rule:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/OfficeNewYork.html

It was already folklore back when I was first part of a company discussing new office locations, in the 90s. (My father may have even mentioned it when I was child.) Since then, I've observed it often – though in fairness that may be confirmation bias.

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: