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by axotty 4233 days ago
This is DHH's take on Yishan's resignation via Twitter. He seems to be heavily implying that this was not a voluntary resignation.

DHH: Reddit CEO's forced uprooting of employees outside SF got full board support, but moving one BART stop? YOU'RE FIRED

DHH: @andrewstepner No CEO is ever fired. Everyone always "voluntarily" resigns, whether that's actually the case or not.

DHH: "Yeah, just force those families to uproot their whole life. Give them a week. Ok, two.", then, "want US to travel 20 mins longer? NO, NO".

https://twitter.com/dhh

2 comments

It's 6-7 further BART stops to Daly City. The continuing leadership also seems committed to geographically-centralizing the team for improved collaboration. I don't think DHH is showing any insight into the situation or players; he's just projecting his pet issues.
> The continuing leadership also seems committed to geographically-centralizing the team for improved collaboration.

Centralizing a dispersed team for improved collaboration would put them somewhere in Nebraska, maybe Colorado. Just say that the investors want them close by.

> It's 6-7 further BART stops to Daly City.

THE HORROR! Let me tell you about my Alameda/peninsula commute!

Can someone explain the office location issue? I haven't been following the drama. I'm assuming there was a large disagreement over moving offices outside of SF to Daly City?

I can see why that might be a divisive issue, but totally agree with DHH regarding the remote workers part.

To someone from outside the Bay Area, it must seem strange that office location could play such a large issue, but the specifics here are important. First, they were (apparently) requiring remote workers to move to the Bay Area.[1] This is weird in and of itself, and not necessarily with much precedent: it's one thing to decide that you don't want to have a distributed work force and/or grow locally, but it's quite another to decide that you want an extant remote work force to magically become local -- especially when local is the most expensive housing market in the country, and one that is essentially impossible to enter as an established adult.

Then, on top of that, they're moving the office to... Daly City?! Daly City is essentially the worst of all worlds: it's not really readily accessible to anyone -- and it's an undesirable eye sore on top of it. There are places that make no sense to relocate to that still make more sense than Daly City (e.g., Pleasanton, San Rafael, Alameda, Walnut Creek, Burlingame) -- Daly City is almost where you would locate a company if you simply hated the employees. So at that point, you do begin to wonder about the mental stability of the CEO: the choice of Daly City is so completely bizarre that it almost certainly reflects other things amiss in the way decisions are made.

[1] https://twitter.com/yishan/status/517365027515285504

Daly City's actually pretty convenient if you live near 280 or, to a lesser extent, 101. Most of it is only a few minutes away from the highway. If they found an office that was within walking distance of BART and had dedicated parking, I could see it being an interesting compromise solution.
Either the next SoMa or the next pets.com
The only way you could move such a thing to Daly City is if you could somehow pitch as a cool place to be. But as the poster below says, yeah, it's a compromise, which makes it a non-starter.
> Daly City is essentially the worst of all worlds: -- and it's an undesirable eye sore on top of it.

104,739 residents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daly_City,_California) would probably disagree.

Also, outside of San Francisco proper, Daly City is the only destination served by 4 BART lines.

> it's not really readily accessible to anyone

Wouldn't it be much easier to commute by car there?

It would be easier than SoMa to commute by car from the South Bay. But it still wouldn't exactly be "readily accessible" from anywhere south of Millbrae...
I saw this a BT in the UK the building services prt of teh comany got ideas above its staion and tried to move peopel out of central london.

All the new buildings had poor transport links - they even tried to move the head office to "a shead at heathrow" which was stoped when the ex engineer CEO used "engineering" language to F off