> If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm actually curious if the location of company headquarters has to do with the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day.
IME this is definitely true and it's often very intentional. One of the major reasons SF stole the startup scene from SV is that younger startup employees wanted to live in SF. As a startup founder you are very strongly incentivized to go where the talent is (or wants to be). When I was considering where to set up my startup a few months ago this was a huge consideration. Not quite at the level of HQ, but there's a reason Google has offices in both SF and South Bay as well, or in both SLU/SLU-area Seattle + across Lake Washington.
> If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF.
I don't think it's about more vs less as much as matching the demographics of your typical employee. Eg experience levels, pay, work culture, personality, mix of job roles
Google has offices in San Francisco but it also has offices in South San Francisco, San Bruno, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and San Jose. And probably some other cities I forgot. The "reason" Google has an office anywhere has to do more with "why not" rather than anything else.
Not the case with the main Google SF office (except now some buildings are indeed the results of acquisitions) but definitely for San Bruno and varied for the other ones.
I had the impression the Google SF office was for capturing that talent that would not be bothered to commute south; but that for most people there it was a career dead end, if you weren’t in Mountain View you weren’t in the game.
At least that’s what the people I know who worked there told me, I don’t have any real inside knowledge and the stories could be wrong despite being plausible.
Yeah, like almost every other central-city engineering office of that era, SF was initially a sales office that SF-resident ICs would sometimes work from on Fridays...and then more often, and then eventually teams wanted to move there, and then...and then...
I wish I understood what you're getting at, because Google does not consider it's employees at all at this point, it's late stage capitalism sweetie. Is there a point, can you clarify?
I mean, even by Marx's own theory. There will be no communism without capitalism fully unfolding and playing out. How will we know when the difference between one stage and the next? Unless we are talking revolution but that's not what most modern communists have in mind
IME this is definitely true and it's often very intentional. One of the major reasons SF stole the startup scene from SV is that younger startup employees wanted to live in SF. As a startup founder you are very strongly incentivized to go where the talent is (or wants to be). When I was considering where to set up my startup a few months ago this was a huge consideration. Not quite at the level of HQ, but there's a reason Google has offices in both SF and South Bay as well, or in both SLU/SLU-area Seattle + across Lake Washington.
> If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF. I don't think it's about more vs less as much as matching the demographics of your typical employee. Eg experience levels, pay, work culture, personality, mix of job roles