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Comment by kenrikm | Hacker News Reader

In my experience you always loose employees when moving offices. It's a really weird feeling just after the move and takes a while to get back into the grove.

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Last place I worked, we moved just a few blocks away, from a really, really awful crappy warehouse in Sunnyvale to a pretty spiffy new facility also in Sunnyvale. I don't think we lost anyone due to that move. So, lesson is to make sure your new office is awesome and not that geographically far from your old one?

Not geographically far can limit you to a tiny distance if you have commuters on caltrain, bart, and muni. Lots of people scoff at the change going from a 5 minute walk from the transportation depot to a 15 minute walk makes, but that made me leave a company. Of course, virtually nobody doing that walk fails to understand, but execs drive.

riverbed?

Sunnyvale is a bit of a different story because I assume everyone is driving to an office in Sunnyvale, at least the last mile, so you can move a mile and not impact anyone that much.

Up in SF, moving the office one mile can add 30 minutes to some people's daily commutes each way.

Absolutely. If lots of reddit's employees are living in the East Bay (feasible since the office is in Soma), a company move to Daly City would make their commute an absolute nightmare. A normal BART ride would turn into a reallllly long BART ride (if the office is anywhere near the station) or a soulcrushing commute over the bridge. I commuted from the Sunset District (essentially Daly City) to Oakland for a year and it was horrendous.

Meanwhile, moving from one office to another within Sunnyvale won't change much considering there are many ways to get in and out of there.

I mean, moving a few blocks isn't that material in terms of people's commutes (and implied relative power/importance/influence).

Moving from one city to another can be highly disruptive.

My last company was the first place I've worked that moved offices while I was there, and we definitely experienced a 'weird feeling' and we lost a bunch of people. Everything just felt off after the move, even though things went smoothly, and our new space was objectively much nicer (upgraded from thoroughly class C space to a nice class A building).

I was trying to stick it out and wait for the culture and mood (which had been fantastic beforehand) to get back in the groove, but our best people started to leave one by one, then one of the founders of my current company reached out to me personally, and it was too hard to pass up.

The key element in moving offices is buy-in. It affects everybody. If you treat your employees like they're part of the furniture during the planning phase then you're going to have exactly the effect you describe. Not saying that was the case but I would not be surprised if it was.

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