News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Stripe to move to South San Francisco by nostrademons on Thursday October 24, 2019 @01:11PM (#21346701)
There're network effects between teams in a big company just like there're network effects between startups in a big city.

As others have mentioned, the big tech companies are all actively doing this. Nevertheless, it's not really taking. I know 3 people who moved from Google's NYC office (the 2nd largest) to Mountain View because all the top-priority projects were in Mountain View. As a general rule of thumb, you want to be where the executives are, and the executives are going to be at headquarters because a.) that's where their home is and b.) that's where all their most productive people are.

There's a steady conveyor belt where young single folks move from satellite offices to headquarters when they want to advance their career and then older folks move to satellite offices when they have kids, to be with their families or enjoy a better quality of life. This is healthy in the sense of maximizing happiness for everyone, but it means that the most ambitious, highest priority projects and most talented people are going to cluster at headquarters.

(As a side note, I feel like not enough people understand that the cost-of-living in SF is an effect of the wealth that's been brought into the area by the tech industry, and isn't just a random fluctuation. If some other metro area suddenly had a large concentration of successful companies that paid high wages, the cost of living would go up there too, until COL-adjusted salaries equalized peoples' preferences for living there.)

Re:Stripe to move to South San Francisco by ImprovedSilence on Thursday October 24, 2019 @02:54PM (#21347931)
A side not to your side note, I think you’re only half right. zoning and nimby-ism are largely creating artificial scarcity in terms of housing supply. SF cost of living gets squeezed on the supply side and demand side. If some other metro area got hit with high demand, presumably it would not have the issue creating supply that SF faces, and thus overall COL wouldn’t be as high.
Re:Stripe to move to South San Francisco by pm90 on Thursday October 24, 2019 @03:46PM (#21348479)
This is an excellent summary of the situation, and reflects on my own career path. I moved from Austin to SF cuz I'm not-married and thus can keep my COL reasonably low while working on high impact, high visibility and frankly, high fun projects. But, its not a lifestyle I would want to keep when I will get married and have kids... a less demanding job + lower COL seems incredibly reasonable to me.