[s3r3nity]

Welcome to Silicon Valley: where everyone has somehow bamboozled themselves into believing that working in a cramped parking space is more valuable than buying office real estate in LITERALLY any other state...

Remember kids: you don’t HAVE to live in California.

[JohnJamesRambo]

The irony is that all the companies and startups work on internet companies which could happen anywhere with internet access. It's not like there is a gold mine under San Francisco streets that requires on site mining. And before you say "the people are the gold mine", those people could be interacted with remotely quite easily.

[SubuSS]

I don't understand the push for remote work.

I have been a part of remote teams for over 11 years of my career (16 yrs). I have worked from home more days than I can count. It has enough drawbacks that I'd avoid it at any given opportunity. Here are a few reasons:

- You are not part of the hallway conversations / decision changes / fly by meetings / face-memory / kitchen run ins and every other benefit of having people together. When your level is senior enough, these are very much a deciding factor in whether your last 6 months of work is going to be thrown out or kept relevant.

- Video conferencing is terrible. If you notice a pattern, the conversation is DOMINATED by the side with most power. I have seen very senior engineers (including myself I suppose) have trouble corralling a meeting / participating in a discussion that's going back and forth animatedly when there are other senior folk in one room. When you are junior, there is a high possibility your chances to speak are just perfunctory because almost all relevant points have been made already.

- Yes I have heard and tried the notions of ensuring meeting etiquette. I have also been part of these meetings where there is someone (or everyone) trying to police how the meeting is run (let everyone speak, juniors go first, go in a circle ...). Those have been considerably less productive to put it mildly. (Remember - I am the one who is remote).

- There are always mic-hogs who don't make a ton of points - most of the efficient places weed these out real quick. In a different rant - I hate optimizing for the bad actors that penalize the good actors heavily. Anyway - in this case you are left with few folks with real talking points not being able to convey the whole nuance.

- Essentially this leads to you doing extra work in ensuring at least some folks on the other side are on the same page before the meeting to ensure your points are considered.

So yes - in short remote is bad IMO. Video conferencing pretty much doesn't work since it doesn't capture the full presence and energy of folks. This is going to sound metaphysical, but my real presence is a million times better representation of the full me than my text/video :). It may work when everyone is remote with an individual screen - the usual situations I am in is where there are 2 or 3 conference rooms with people.

[mawburn]

Having people work remote in a non-remote culture is a completely different experience than working with a fully remote culture.

If the entire team/division/org doesn't fully embrace it, it usually just doesn't work. That doesn't mean everyone had to be remote, either.

[SubuSS]

Can you please suggest some ways how to fully embrace this? I don't think offices are going away at least in my fang world.

I saw a note about everyone headphoning in - I can try this, but am skeptical because those people are still going to be more present than me (I mentioned this in my op). There are going to be side conversations, notes, glances, eye rolls, sighs I miss - the things I definitely need to get the full presence. Not to mention the walkie talkie nature of this - with everyone muting / unmuting and feedbacking.

I am open to other ideas - but am looking for ones that don't make the human interaction a lot more measured and artificial. As much as I like to be Spock, my xp points at emotions driving 90% of real decisions because the logical ones pretty much are a lay up in a sane group.

[mawburn]

Well, we went through the transition at my last job so I kind of have some incite. We had 3 or 4 people on my project who had came over from Invision, who are a fully remote company and I have a good friends at other well known fully remote companies that I gleamed things from to help us transition from 0 remote company to a fully remote project team (50ppl-ish).

1. Every meeting should be video first. Going without video should be extraordinarily rare. Even if that's just an impromptu meeting with 2 or 3 people. Kill conference phones completely. Get used to screen sharing. Good reliable tools like Zoom are invaluable. You miss a lot from body language and facial expressions if you use audio only, which will fix your major issue. It also makes people feel more included and that the people working somewhere else are actually real people and not just voices. Make good use of Slack video

2. Every meeting should be able to be taken as remote, even if that means just from your desk (or personal meeting room if you're in an open office). This means that the people who are in a conference room must be on video with an open mic, unless there is uncontrollable excessive background noise or something. No cross the table talk on mute.

3. Don't be afraid to make temp rooms with multiple people when you have conversations on Slack (or whatever you use), it'll help more people get involved as if you were talking at someone's desk.

The first 2 things are extremely important. Invision has recently released some blogs about cultivating a good remote culture that are pretty good. I don't have any links handy, however but it's worth a look if you're interested.

[dsfyu404ed]

Any team that spans several locations is going to have some/all of those issues anyway. Why make people suffer though living in a particular place on top of that?

[ebiester]

The push is that some of us are led by life circumstances to do so. (For example, I am married to an academic with a tenure track position outside of a top-50 city.) My choices are to commute to another city or work remotely. (Coming home for the weekends sucks, by the way.) ____

That said, I find that full remote works really well. Half-remote is a lot more difficult for the reasons you say, but encouraging all employees to work remote some of the time starts to equalize those issues, because everyone has the empathy of the experience.

I've developed a set of coping strategies, but I agree that it's a tradeoff unless everyone is remote.

[SubuSS]

Oh I understand the real world pressures, that's definitely not what I was discounting. I can see why people want it, I am discussing the efficacy of it and questioning this general push instead of opt in. IMO that's what you are trading for this Sophie's choice of a situation :/

Unless your exec board itself is fully remote, I don't think a company can be. I don't know of many companies like that :(

[bluGill]

The only remote meetings that work are ones where everybody is remote. Even if you are sitting next to someone in the same meeting, your both have your headphones on so that you only hear each other via the call. As soon as there is a room there is a struggle in my experience: it is too easy talk to the people in the room.

There is on type of in room meeting that works: the all employee meeting. The agenda is preset (first Joe will talk about goals, then Carla will go over financials, then Fred will update us on United way...).

[sreyaNotfilc]

I saw 'San Francisco' and rolled my eyes. This is the dumbest idea I have seen in a while.

What if someone runs you over trying to back into a spot? What if something falls from the sky (besides rain)? Or someone runs off with your equipment because your weren't looking? Or even, its a busy day and someone didn't reserve a parking spot.

Putting your workers at risk because you're trying to save some dough is highly irresponsible.

[nkrisc]

Read the article. The primary point is activism. This isn't about money or saving costs at all. In fact the only mention of price was to pay the hourly parking rate, there's no mention of anyone collecting or making any other money on it. There's no formal system here, just some inspired activism to make a point about how much space is devoted to parking.

[sreyaNotfilc]

I believe that my stance still stands.

Say a lot of people join the bandwagon and become activists in this manner. Or even that, say someone is thinking that this is actually a great idea and starts buying up Parkmobile spots to.

Sitting in a parking lot, no matter what the cause or circumstance is, is a recipe for disaster.

Its still a highly unsafe thing to do.

[nkrisc]

> Its still a highly unsafe thing to do.

You are correct. However sometimes activists choose to risk their personal well-being to bring attention to issues or to make their point. I wouldn't worry about this becoming a normal thing.

The concerns you raise are about the practicality of this stunt. However the practicality of it is irrelevant to the purpose and not the point.

[Luc]

Woosh!

[wDcBKgt66V8WDs]

If you're a techie, young with no family, and you want good culture, good climate, good outdoors, and good job prospects...the valley is hard to beat.

Yes I know about droughts, we can debate all day if the culture is good or terrible, all these tech people are ruining the parks, yadayadayada. Point still stands, the san fran area has a unique and sought after position.

And to address your point about gold mine of people, not every company does the whole remote thing. I mean I agree remote shouldn't be hard but it's a legitimate position to prefer onsite employees.

[s3r3nity]

> yadayadayada

You claim all of these to be unique characteristics, then wave off all reasonable (and in some cases, strong) arguments to the contrary that the Valley is hard to beat.

If it’s “hard to beat” because of X, Y, Z, and there are many other places with better examples of X, Y, and Z qualities, then there’s little about the position that should make SF “unique” or “sought after.”

Climate + outdoors + good job prospects are pretty much everywhere. In fact, you might be able to enjoy them more in other spots because of better commutes (less driving and/or better public transit,) better living conditions, and more purchasing power (lower prices on everything + lower rents / housing prices.)

But I guess the views are nice...?

[dcosson]

Can’t tell if you’re serious but this was a joke/stunt. The point being to show how poor of a use of space it is to have street parking lining every street in an expensive and crowded city.

[chrisan]

He may have taken it too literally... but he does have a point. Everyone doesn't _need_ to live in SF.

> proving two points: one about the high cost of coworking spaces in an already unaffordable city, and another about how the space currently dedicated to on-street parking in cramped cities like San Francisco could be put to better and more human-centric use.

You can reduce your cost of living/co-working by moving out of the city.

I can't imaging wanting to deal with fumes, electricity, weather, traffic dangers just to stay in the city by converting parking spots to more "human-centric" areas.

[dcosson]

Again...it was a stunt. These were pro-housing folks but no one is suggesting directly turning parking into makeshift long term office space or housing. Human centric uses might include — protected bike lanes, trees so that the sidewalks feel further removed from cars, food trucks, outdoor cafe seating, etc.

Also, sure, not everyone needs to live in SF. But that’s a completely unrelated point. There are still people who do choose to live here and want to make the city a nicer place to live.

[zrobotics]

Ironically, the pictures of one of the #wepark offices in the article was literally directly in front of empty commercial real estate for lease. What does this stunt prove, aside from being slightly silly? Should all the buildings be expanded by ~6',and the sidewalk moved directly adjacent to the road? Because even if personal automobiles are entirely eliminated, roads will still be necessary for access. As a tounge-in-cheek protest against high prices it works, but I think the grandparent is making a more salient point than the wepark group. If your job can be done from a temporary office environment (and many of the people interviewed already worked from their homes) then a far better solution to expensive real estate is to move, especially if you are already working remotely.

How much space can actually be reclaimed from on-street parking in a feasible manner? Likely not enough to make a significant difference in the price of real-estate.

[dcosson]

Just a badly written article. The way I interpreted it (just having followed along a bit on twitter, I don't know these people personally) this particular thing is not directly about real estate. It's about better uses of outdoor/street space, focused on people rather than cars.

This is extremely valuable space, and it's rented out, far below its market value, by a city that claims to value environmental issues, to be put towards one of the worst offenders of carbon emissions (personal vehicles). It also adds to congestion and makes a city less enjoyable when the roads are wider and everything that isn't a car is a second class citizen.

Some better uses might be - more protected bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, trees to offset the sidewalk further from the road or make sidewalks wider for a more vibrant, walkable street life.

[s3r3nity]

Yeah I did catch on, but my read was that the conclusion of this stunt could drive thinking in a few directions.

One of the more popular directions would be to push for more building, and/or better transit options.

My recommendation was to push for more rational / sanity in the labor market choices: right now, it seems like it’s blasphemous to consider _NOT_ living in SF.

Rather than trying to push for enormous change at all levels, you can just say “nah there are better choices for me to live.”

[nafey]

The other side of the coin is that a lot of very talented people congregate in places like Silicon Valley, so you rule out the potential of hiring/working for/working with them.

[cbm-vic-20]

There are a lot of very talented people in places like Seattle and Boston, too, and yet the VCs and companies out in SF/SV are stuck in their little bubble.

[dsfyu404ed]

Let them stay in their bubble. Every time CA vomits out a substantial number of upper-middle/upper class people it ruins another city, sometimes a whole state.

[JohnFen]

Although SV culture seems to think otherwise, there are lots of very talented people across the rest of the nation as well. I've found them everywhere that I've worked.

[lalos]

One could argue that this is the reason for why it's expensive, to limit the amount of people that can be there. The invisible hand at play.

[Johnny555]

That doesn't really seem to be working -- people are coming but are doubling and tripling (and quadrupling) up in housing that wasn't meant to accommodate them.

Of course, that's nothing new - I rented a large closet (literally a closet) when I first moved to SF over 2 decades ago. Eventually I got promoted to the formal dining room (which unfortunately was the walkway from the bedrooms to the livingroom, but still beat living in a closet!)