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by bcantrill 4235 days ago
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

4 comments

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...