Am I the only one that immediately sees that as a sign of 'Maybe people should setup satellite offices and stop recruiting in the Valley due to costs'?
Where remote work is a viable option, then it's obviously easy to tackle.
Where it isn't, set up shop in a smaller market that isn't the valley and have a separate office. Execs can split-time between the locations if necessary, but standing up an office in Houston, Austin, Atlanta, or wherever, and hiring another manager for that location can pay for itself quickly, considering wage-market discrepancy.
My office is in Mountain View, but I live in Annapolis, MD. We have an office in Georgetown, DC, that's about an hour away from me. I work from home, but have the convenience of the DC office in the event that I need to physically sign papers, get stationery, or whatever, and I fly out to MV for a week every couple of months, or every quarter.
Our company has a services division as well, that is mostly remote (though, remote in that scenario is generally on customer premises), and while sure, we have a need for office in some spots, we most of the time don't, so we oversubscribe desks and such. I think we have 6 desks in the Georgetown office for 20-something employees, and it's extremely rare that they're ever full.
Is there convincing evidence that such approach works?
There were articles that Google's employees in satellite offices were alienated due to perceived lack of power over decisions, power struggles with the mothership (Mountain View engineers would schedule meetings at a time that's convenient to them, forcing their foreign office to be online at ungodly hours), and project visibility.
SF is really about concluding deals face to face and access for startups. Your main office could be in Costa Rica or Moldavia it doesnt matter(and I have great respect for these countries ), you want to sell a product or VC,it's better to actually have someone in SF, network is everything in business.
Sure, it just takes a certain type of employee. Needs to be someone who values autonomy and is working on things that don't need two guys on a keyword in front of a monitor trying to figure out.
This is silly. Nobody HAS to live in an $8k/mo 2br. Even here. You probably read that TC article which mentioned some apartments in a complex in Mountainview.
Yes, it's expensive, but no, it's not 8k, it's half that.
Moreover, what on earth would that have to do with acquihires?
The GP's assertion was hyperbole. Acquihires are not the "default hiring method."
Point taken. In downtown Chicago, I can get an extremely nice 2000sqft+ 2 bed/2bath luxury condo with 2 parking spaces, and still have money left over at $4K/month.
I think a better word than "insane" is "unsustainable." A pet theory of mine is that if the median household salary in a given locality isn't enough to qualify for the median mortgage in the same locality, that locality has a problem. All of San Francisco has that problem and an increasing amount of the area around it does, too. I'm not sure when this will come home to roost, but I'd be surprised if it isn't within the next couple of years. (I also suspect the tolerance for spending three hours a day commuting between SF and the South Bay, even on private buses, will drop as the commuters age, but we'll see.)
There are still places which are considerably cheaper and even still accessible via regional transit like BART, but they're cheaper because they're not considered "interesting" neighborhoods. In another 6-12 months we may see a lot more people deciding the East Bay isn't so bad after all.
