Daly City is a world away from 520 3rd. There is nothing of any kind worth mentioning in Daly City. There is culture, entertainment, education, recreation, and all the benefits of real city life steps away from Reddit's current office. In addition the building at 520 3rd has a tradition of housing famous Internet companies.

and, more importantly, bart is only convenient in a very narrow corridor of sf, so this could be turning 15-25 minute commutes into hour plus commutes, spanning two transport systems in sf. A recipe to make your employees hate it.

As someone completely unaffiliated with San Francisco, all of this honestly just makes the employees sound like primadonnas. While it may be cool to be "steps away" from that stuff you listed (and I doubt you're being fair to Daly City), it certainly shouldn't make or break a job that you're otherwise happy with.

I understand the argument about exacerbating commutes (even though it sounds crazy for a short-distance move) but I think this one is quite weak.

I'm shocked that you value your free time so low.

Let's do the math.

There are 24 hours in a day. You should be sleeping for ~8 of those leaving 16. Assuming you are supposed to be at the office for 8 hours (pipe dream, but let's just go for it) that leaves 8 hours of time for other stuff. If you previously had a great 15-30 minute commute then you would have 7 hours of free time to work on side projects and do things you want to do. That would be a pretty sweet normal life. Adding an extra hour to the commute cuts your free time down by ~30%. That is a big deal.

I also find it very helpful to include any time spent commuting as "working time" when considering where to work. You should also consider the increased cost to commute from a more like this. An extra hour of driving 5 days/week represents a non-trivial amount of money. So the salary needs to compensate, or the time at the office needs to go down.

No matter how you look at this, a move like this is asking all of the employees on the short end of the stick to effectively take home less money (not exactly a pay cut, but the end result is the same).

Edit: oh and I'm not from SF, I live in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. This has nothing to do with SF.

SF has <500K actual residents.

The bay area has something like 15 million people.

Do the math.

One either has a shitty rent/house payment or a shitty commute.

> SF has <500K actual residents.

2013 US Census estimate is 837,442, which is considerably more than 500,000. [1]

> The bay area has something like 15 million people.

The 9-county Bay Area has approximately 7.1 million people as of 2010. [2]

[1] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html

[2] http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm

Thanks! So lets say there is ~8-9x in the metro for every 1x in the city.

NYC by comparison has ~2.5x in the metro for every 1x in the City.[1]

__________

[1] 19.9 million vs 8.4 million.

BART is not your conventional subway, and the 'couple stops' are a lot further than usual.