Why are there a ton of great reasons to have your core engineering team in SF? Biggest concentration of talent seems like the main (only?) positive. Super high cost of hiring + recruiting these days, difficulty getting candidates to accept offers, quick turnover are just a few reasons not to.

Distributed teams are where it's at. There is no need to make your most experienced people with the deepest knowledge (often the married people with children) go through all the drama and hot mess that is the Bay region. The taxes. Finding an apartment (or house!). Finding a school for your kids. The cost of living. Parking. The NIMBYism, political correctness, and hatred of engineers a la the Google Bus. The overhead of homelessness, and the aroma of shit and piss on the street.

At some point, companies are going to have to get with the program if they want to keep their best people. That will happen once enough of them can't fill senior roles. They'll respond to quality of life issues—those are getting more important in hiring, not less. You don't need to locate your engineering team in SF and force them to put up with all that bullshit. Make life easier for them, not harder.

I wonder if there's good ways to connect your offices via connections in physical locations, always on.

I envisage a whole wall that's a screen with a camera, acting like a portal to a different office location. Stick it in a corridor or a tearoom, a common area where people can just encounter one another at random and chat. If you want to have an in-depth talk with someone at another office, send them a message asking to meet at one of the portal locations rather than scheduling a Skype session. Encourage people to meet and introduce themselves to people they happen to see through the portal.

Does anyone do this kind of thing?

Atlassian did exactly that, scattering large displays with a permanent audio/video link to an equivalent in another office around their hallways.

Would you happen to know what software setup they have for this?

Where I work it has been done with Google Chrome Boxes. It's a video conferencing platform for Hangouts.

We have someone working remotely through Hangouts. Unfortunately, he has to reconnect a few times a day because the call quality drops after a couple hours. Have you experienced similar?

My friends and I often use Teamspeak when gaming and general socializing. It's very much like sitting down in a room and being able to talk to everyone.

I wonder if there is a professional market for this? Something like a Slack for audio.

I've worked off and on remotely for decades. Most day to day work can be handled adequately by email and Skype. What's missing are the camaraderie you get from going out to lunch with colleagues, bull sessions, friendships, etc., which are important for building a team.

That's why you take periodic trips to meet with everyone.

For a partially distributed company you just come to the office 2-4 times a year. For fully distributed companies, you plan company wide events a few times a year to allow that face to face.

There's Slack for that.

Slack really doesn't cut it for team building and building camaraderie. Where I work we're fully remote and the difference between Slack and actually getting together in a beach house for a week and collaborating is not at all comparable for the boost of morale.

The Bay area is often a losing proposition, financially, for engineering talent.

Taxes, housing, general expenses are all outrageous and do not often come with commensurate salary increases.

I personally will not move anywhere in CA due to a few of the things you've listed (NIMBYs, PC, CA political climate in general.)

Venture capital is about the only thing SF has that can't be found elsewhere.

Moving to a more employer-friendly place is a losing startegy if you're good enough to get offers in SF. Good engineers will by and large figure out that being in SF is better for them in pay and mobility, and so will not follow you to the middle of nowhere.

On the other hand, I would like to see development of "minor" tech hubs in other more livable cities. I'd give anything to have access to SF-type employment in Chicago, as long as it didn't turn the Chicago housing market into SF's.

> pay and mobility, and so will not follow you to the middle of nowhere.

I've never seen pay properly compensate for the harsh (tangible) expenses of living in SF/CA.

Seattle, Austin, Boulder, in my experience, have all had far better value props.

> Chicago housing market into SF's

As much as I dislike Chicago (political reasons): SF-style-housing-market can't happen there. The city has massive amounts of sprawl, vehicular commuting is common, real estate is plentiful and inexpensive. It's not a peninsula full of NIMBYs.

You can always put housing further from the center, but the radius of not-insane commute times is much harder to expand. Wider highways encourage further-flung suburbs, resulting in at best the same level of congestion, often more.

Fortunately Chicago already has the CTA and Metra infrastructure, and we could presumably make trains longer (and run them more frequently) for a reasonable price. Though at some point you hit the limits of safe separation between trains and the inefficiencies of block signaling. CTA rail doesn't have the physical infrastructure to run express services (there are very few places where a train on a specific line can bypass another) so building more stations doesn't necessarily help you either.

Nashville has a fantastic python community, so there is a strong argument to have some engineering staff there too.

Having a large pool of potential employees to draw from and also you have to be close to the VC firms.

Interestingly, I briefly worked for a company with a presence both in Silicon Valley and in Charleston, SC. The developers were (with a few exceptions) located in Charleston with marketing and customer facing roles out west. The location of engineering was pretty transparently a cost move, but having the office in the Bay area still put them as a Silicon Valley operation. What I wonder is, what's the job market like for the customer facing roles out there?

Depends if its an old over 10 years company and doesn't need to quickly employ lots of developers that could work but you are limiting your pool to the local one.

As my boss(director level) at Reed Elsiver said if you have offices in the suburbs/boonies you don't get the best developers. Given the large number of disastrous projects we had to try and help recover Id agree with him.

It's absolutely the case that having technical support, technical delivery, tech pubs, QA, engineering, all sitting close together and interacting has a lot of value.

Harder to make the argument for expert-tree customer support though, I'll grant you that.

The distractions can certainly take away valuable devloper time as well.

you would think by this day that the advances in teleconferencing could reduce the need to be located all in one area, let alone in expensive areas. I know tech support doesn't have to have a central location, have many vendors who support persons work from home and most aren't near their hq.

If anything having core members in a tech hot spots is just asking them to move to another company when the mood suits them. Yeah you might miss out on some hot shots but you open the door to lose yours

I used to think remote work was the key then I worked on a distributed team for 18 months and I found I hated it. I like working with my coworkers.