senseamp

I am skeptical of the story. Bloomberg should have at least had pictures of the chips on a board, something from reality. Instead they had illustrations. These were commercially available products, they should have independently found a smoking gun board sample with such chips and analyzed it, and not take their sources' word for it. This seems like a planted story to me.

Translation: You all get in here, collectively spend billions of dollars of your investor's money developing commodity chips that run this middle-ware project we control, then compete on price for a chance to get subsistence level gross margins on your silicon instead of writing it all off. Or maybe we'll just use all of you to get better pricing from another vendor entirely, like we did with all these ARM server CPU wannabes. And they'll get plenty of suckers big and small. Looks like Qualcomm and Marvell(Cavium) are signing up again. Cadence is the smart one here, because it will sell EDA tools to all of them, so at least it will make some money.

You either can be outsourced inexpensively, or you can't. If you can, but your physical presence in a Bay Area office is effective in stopping your employer from figuring it out, then you should probably stay here.

Cost of living adjustments are market distortions that lead to things like this housing affordability crisis. Landlords jack up rents because of high local pay, cost of living goes up, and instead of letting employees move elsewhere and work remotely at existing pay, companies increase local pay more to compensate, and landlords just jack up rent again. That cycle needs to be broken before things change. Pay people for their productivity, not how much their landlords want for rent. If someone is less productive due to less spontaneous coworker interaction, then fine, pay them less to work remotely. But if they are delivering same results, they should be paid same.

Best thing a tech company can do to solve CA housing crisis is let workers who desire to do so work remotely from other states without taking a pay cut (beyond actual reduction in productivity, if any). Market forces will take care of the rest.

The effect will be many-fold:

- Increase in employee satisfaction and quality of life. Those who leave will have a much lower cost of living and can enjoy the extra money. Those who stay here will be here because it's worth the money to them.

- Lower real estate costs for employer.

- Reduction in employment and resulting housing demand in California.

- Increase in tech populations in other areas leading to networking effects and economies of scale, making them more attractive to work at, further reducing housing demand in CA.

- Better distribution of tech talent and benefits in the country, reducing anti-tech resentment and political backlash.

- Loss of (tens of?) thousands of dollars in income and sales tax revenue for CA, per employee, imposing a real fiscal cost for not implementing housing supply friendly policies, and creating proper political incentives.

- Loss of demand for local businesses and services, leading to a negative feedback loop to reduce local opposition to increasing housing supply.

- Opportunities for tech and other businesses that embrace and help facilitate remote work.

- Tech companies being closer to average people, aware and solving their real world problems instead of SF techies' scooter and/or food delivery needs.

Stuffing more employees into the Bay Area and throwing a few bucks to YIMBY is not a serious solution, it's a fig leaf.