I understand this is HN and many here love SF so can you explain to me how or why a company would want to have a physical location in downtown SF? It is expensive, higher tax, more regulations, all of which are often hated by a pure capitalist corporation. With the remote work push, the argument about talent pool is moot as well.

IMO, moving out of SF is the correct choice. In fact, moving out of CA is also a correct choice, if profit is all a company is looking for.

With the remote work push, the argument about talent pool is moot as well.

Isn't Elon massively anti-remote?

Not only Elon Musk. Lots of companies are backtracking on full remote work. Statu quo seems to be hybrid work for many big companies.

And I’ll just preemptively jump in and nip this in the bud before some HNer writes their anti-RTO manifesto in the replies:

Not all organisations or executives have a vested interest in commercial real estate. Especially this late in the game when plenty of orgs have had an opportunity to let their leases expire.

Not all RTO action is due to some perverted desire by incompetent managers to see subordinate butts in seats, either.

There is a sizeable contingent of leadership that legitimately sees in-person work as the best means of eliciting productivity from their staff, and are willing to trade off taking a hit from some staff not being happy about this, and potentially leaving. You might not agree with the strategy. You might strongly feel that it’s wrong. But the reality is that they believe it.

Furthermore there is certainly a sizeable contingent of staff that would prefer a hybrid role to full WFH. I’m not talking about faceless sales leadership extroverts as techies often put it. I’m talking about ICs. I’m talking about developers.

And there are certainly, certainly people that just don’t feel as strongly about it as a lot of the people here.

I’d love for just one WFH-related thread to not devolve into faux-intelligent basically-xeroxed screeds about commercial real estate and dumb management.

It is an attractive location for young people that want to live in SF instead of the boring burbs. Downtown has a ton of food options for lunch. You can walk over to a Giants game or to the waterfront. Union Square in particular has turned into something of a trash heap, but FiDi to the north and SOMA to the south are (mostly) attractive.

It is easily accessible for anyone on BART or Muni lines so you may not need to own a car.

Outside of that, it's still a flex to have a downtown SF office. This isn't just for warm feelings, it can affect fundraising and talent attraction.

And currently, office prices are super low in SF. My company is paying about 1/5th of the price (literally) for the top floor of a building compared to a company that rents the floor below them (which signed a 5 year lease in 2019).

Good riddance. That part of San Francisco has been worse than the risky areas of most third world cities for the last 3-4 years.

I don't understand how this beautiful city was let to deteriorate so fast.

I don't understand how this beautiful city was let to deteriorate so fast.

Didn't people vote for this?

worse than the risky areas of most third world cities for the last 3-4 years

You can just say that you never leave well-to-do regions of the US in less words.

Doing this on a few weeks notice seems rather insane to me. Unless you have very good remote work options this is very disruptive for employees.

I cannot understand why anyone would work there, especially in office. but each their own.

I have him blocked but the CEO has 200 million followers. Even assuming 20% are real people, I'd imagine there's quite a few of those who'd love to work at his company.

Why do you have him blocked, and just not following him?

I don’t know if you’ve been on X lately but even if not following him you can receive push notifications from his tweets. Tested this on multiple accounts now, he’s unavoidable unless blocked and sometimes not even then because of all the bootlicker accounts that screenshot and repost his tweets. Frankly it’s made the platform unusable to me, almost nothing he posts is interesting or worth reading.

Why be on X in the first place? I lost all reason to be there about around the time of the rename.

exactly!

reading xitter today is worse than daytime television.

contributing to it's content pool is just counter intuitive.

So my understanding is Elon reduced the algorithm's bubble effect - causing people to be exposed to contrarian content, content a person doesn't agree with, so that it would be witnessed by more people.

Do you think it's a problem that people are coddled in bubbles?

A lot of scientists and journalists have not moved to other platforms. I tried to use instagram instead but the algorithmic injection of content and a terrible UI make it unusable for me.

I find using Twitter in the "following" mode, as opposed to the default "for you", I get a lot of value content and almost no noise.

I just have Musk muted and I never, ever see his posts nor retweets.

The question is, how many of these "candidates" still love him while/after working at one of his companies?

Elon has an estimated 110,000+ employees across all his companies. Maybe you can find one and ask?

I doubt many of them would be honest with you out of fear of legal consequences: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesfarrell/2024/03/21/elon-mu...

Yet, they still choose to work under him. I go by actions of people to get their real beliefs.

Folks with H1B visas have an undue burden on any attempt to move jobs. Also interviewing is hell for many tech folks who are extremely introverted (myself included in that last part.)

Very true although anyone on a H1B may have to file a bunch of paperwork since their job location changed. Although I suppose the paperwork is going to be more something that twitter's attorneys need to do.

probably got kicked out since Elon did not want to pay rent. Maybe the locks got changed.

Why would X have gotten kicked out for unpaid rent?

The building manager stopped any and all proceedings against X for the two months of alleged unpaid rent.

Just because you caught up with back payments doesn’t mean the landlord wants you around anymore.

Not all delinquencies may have reached the level of lawsuit, either, while still being a problem.

Doubtful narrative. In a time when occupancy is going up you would not want to kick our your anchor. Having a large company like X can help boost the rest of the area.

Shifting offices is also a way to get rid of staff without having to fire or lay them off.

Incorrect. Shifting office is a layoff (constructive dismissal).

Thats generally the point with sudden disruptive moves - high attrition. Reduce the headcount without having to be in the news for layoffs.

Or the company is just led by a highly erratic narcissist with a track record (across several companies) of not treating his employees well.

Build cult, treat like cult members.

I dunno. He seems somewhat consistent. I think people just generally don’t like the things he’s consistent about.

He is a consistent liar making fall promises that never come to fruition.

I think people just generally don’t like being constantly fooled.

making fall promises that never come to fruition

That's definitely not consistent; the SpaceX stuff may be always behind his schedule, but it does actually deliver, and even those delays are ahead of the rest of the entire industry planet-wide; and those cars he sells don't have FSD, but they do actually exist and are really electric (the sucess of electric cars over e.g. hydrogen wasn't a given even when he took over).

SpaceX seems mostly operated by Gwynn, and the electric cars existed before Musk ever bought into Tesla.

Directionally agreed though, he and his companies have achieved some really remarkable things. Makes the fall from grace, especially in such foreseeable ways (i.e. self-radicalizing on Twitter), all the more disappointing.

They've already cut about 80% of their workforce since Elon took over, I'm not sure how much more attrition they can take. Sure the site still mostly works in the technical sense, but the way it works now has led to a significant decline in revenue and active users.

They've cut out things like viewing who liked a tweet etc (for cost savings I suspect) so the site is probably dirt cheap. Can't imagine ads don't pay for the cost of running servers at this point, and a headcount reduction might bring it to profitability.

The ads may pay for the servers and reduced headcount[1], but there is no way that they pay for servicing the $10B of high-interest debt that the company was saddled with.

[1] Though with the NYT reporting that the American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition it might not be so obvious.

Yes, the debt weighs heavily around their neck. If it eventually ends up in bankruptcy, will Elon Musk lose control of his beloved x.com domain name for the second time?

He’ll probably name his next kid X. His history at PayPal shows how obsessed he is with that letter.

Maybe they could declare bankruptcy and sell for pennies on the dollar to a mysterious new holding company: Ksum Nole, LLC.

That's not how a bankruptcy works. In a bankruptcy, the company is owned by the creditors and gets resolved by them. Usually a business will attempt to avoid bankruptcy by filing Chapter 11[1] or similar so they get to propose a plan for restructuring that will pay back the creditors over time, but their actions as debtor in posession are scrutinized by the US trustee to ensure they meet a fiduciary obligation to the debtors, and the debtors can file a court case to appeal both the chap 11 and can try to get the debtor kicked out and a trustee appointed if they aren't acting in their interests.

[1] https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/bankruptcy/bankruptc...

American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition

Debt service was estimated at ~$100m/mo, with the likelihood that rates on some of the debt could increase substantially since the financing was initially booked in mid 2022.

If these numbers are directionally accurate (and they do not report, so we don't know for sure), this thing is probably closer to losing a billion $ annually than to breakeven.

Debt service was estimated at ~$100m/mo

source?

$13 Billion leveraged buyout means that Twitter took on $13 Billion in loans for the privilege of being bought out by Elon.

Assuming a rough interest rate of 10% to 15%, leaves 100million to 150million / month on debt alone.

The issue is the $13 Billion loans and estimated $1.3 Billion/year interest payments.

I'm sure Elon can wipe those out himself, but it's still a lot of money that isn't accounted for. Twitter cannot merely float at barely profitability. Twitter needs at least $1.3 Billion/year to counteract interest payments.

Elon can either directly pay the loans himself, or lend money to Twitter/X.

I actually don't think the removal of like views has anything to do with revenue.

I think they actually did this so users are free to like whatever they want without having to worry about getting vilified for liking something that is not supported by the majority. For example liking something political or anti whatever.

I don't know if you are serious but because of LLMs trained on our work basically every tech company is scrambling for ways to get rid of programmers. Just yesterday I commented in a thread here where someone said 80% of their work is LLMable "bullshit" (somehow that guy, like many, didn't connect it to headcount or likelihood of keeping own job...)

Even if it wasn't for LLMs, it feels like a long time since I did more than convert someone else's Figma (or Adobe XD, or Photoshop document) into code, and glue it to a pre-existing API.

I'm sure real estate lawyers feel much the same about how rote their work is.

People pay for that, and it's valuable, but it does feel like these tasks should've been automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.

Lawyers or real engineers can only push a button and still have secure jobs because they have licenses/certifications/boards and liabilities with consequences. There is no such thing in programming. (Even though our mistakes can and do also lead to real people dying)

it feels like a long time since I did more than convert someone else's Figma (or Adobe XD, or Photoshop document) into code, and glue it to a pre-existing API

That looks like webdev, that's like a minuscule part of all programming in question.

automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.

I think LLMs is the worst part of it because literally what programmers do is used against them. It's like taxi drivers used to train self driving cabs to automate themselves out of jobs, except imagine self driving cars actually worked and there are no unions or protective gov regulation and taxi drivers all cheer for this because each thinks the whole firing and pay reduction is only for someone else not themselves:)

That looks like webdev, that's like a minuscule part of all programming in question.

Mobile, even smaller.

It's like taxi drivers used to train self driving cabs to automate themselves out of jobs

I was talking to a taxi driver pre-pandemic (from his passenger seat) who was enthusiastic about FSD even though it would end his career.

And if FSD AI don't perform some of their training by trying to predict what all the other cars will do, they're missing out on a huge opportunity.

More broadly, I think this pattern applies to all labour: surveillance is easy, humanoid robots exist.

FSD is moot because it didn't work in the end.

this pattern applies to all labour

Yup, that was the point of the taxi analogy.

It is why unions/gov protections/certifications exist... accountability and keeping society from unraveling

To me "revenue and MAUs have declined significantly" sounds like a reason they would want to reduce employee numbers, rather than a reason they wouldn't.

At least in a conventional business that uses revenue to pay wages.

Layoffs are expensive compared to making people miserable so they quit.

Only if you pay severance/etc., which X doesn't.

Terminating employees without cause (i.e. due to employee’s poor performance) entitles the employer to unemployment benefits, causing the state to increase the business’s unemployment insurance premiums.

If an employee quits or is terminated due to not coming into work, then they are not eligible for unemployment benefits, and hence the business’s unemployment insurance premiums are unaffected.

There’s how much the company can take, and how much Elon thinks the company can take. He subscribes to the ubermensch view, where him and maybe two other superior specimens of manhood could single handedly run the entire company.

Did you think it would collapse when he canned the 80%

Revenue is down by a larger percentage than the headcount, right? I think that counts as "collapse" by any reasonable definition.

I thought the company would collapse after firing 80% of staff, and for a long time I kept arguing that Twitter was still in the "Wile E Coyote ran off the edge of the cliff but didn't fall yet" phase where they were running on pure momentum. I must admit, as time goes by, it's harder and harder to argue that. I just can't believe that 80% of the company was really just not needed. Every company I've ever worked at was lean to the point where they almost couldn't get anything done due to lack of people. I can't imagine a company that could lose 80% of their people and keep on trucking.

Twitter’s US revenue has dropped -83% from $661M in Q2 of 2022 to $114M in Q2 of 2024 according to: https://twitter.com/RealNeilC/status/1817562915634819464

That's a pretty dramatic collapse.

The thing about Infra - is that if all you want is 99% uptime - that's, with reasonable architectural decisions - relatively straightforward. You can run with a skeleton crew (particularly if you make really smart Infra Decisions like Midjourney, Whatsapp, others have done an outsource 95%+ of your infra to a third party (Discord, Platform Messaging APIs).

As time goes on though, and you go through incident review after incident review, and sharpen things up - and 99% becomes 99.9% you start to get diminishing returns on more Infra Employees - at some point they don't add much reliability value (but boy do they make pager rotation schedules pretty nice).

My sense (from both interviewing and working with them) is that the vast majority of people fired/laid off from Twitter weren't (for the most part - definitely lots of exceptions) core engineers or core infra-people -they were people on the periphery associated with making Twitter a friendly place for advertisers, and just maintaining a healthy work-life balance for the Infra people - a job where you could work your 30-32/hours week without it becoming all encompassing.

When they were fired, Twitter became a very unfriendly place, and the advertisers ran away, and the revenue crashed.

I think Twitter is down 60% in advertisers and 30% in users? Elon personality is part of it, but losing so many people handling community, clients, institutions… I am sure the company has lost most of its institutional knowledge.

I thought the same when they fired a bunch of people at my old employer (and 98% of the developers left).

Well, they just outsourced everything to cheap devs in India and things kept rolling. No new features and some new bugs, but most things work.

Turns out you don't really need that much to keep lights on.

Depends on your standards I guess. You could cut it down to one person and have a website running. As it stands if you look at most people's profiles when logged out you see tweets starting a couple years ago other than the pinned tweet. I haven't used it much since a bit before Elon took over but generally as I understand it's more buggy and spammy than before. If that's good enough, I guess you could say it's still trucking.

Funny thing is that I took the opposite side of that bet. I figured Elon would slash things that people thought were important but actually weren't, and make it more efficient. It's mostly played out, except that the site is still rickety. But maybe from a business perspective that's not important, which is a shame for us.

Not able to comment on the technical side, but for sure a lot people who got sacked were on moderation. Some countries like mine eventually lost all moderators specifically working for that country. And it does show in the amount of spam an unchecked racism etc, which is a big reason why many advertisers left.

From a moderation point of view, Twitter arguably did collapse. The technical side is not all there is to it when running social media.

I can't imagine a company that could lose 80% of their people and keep on trucking.

Musk didn't buy Twitter to make money or learn how to run a successful business. "Keep on trucking" isn't what Twitter is supposed to be doing right now. 20% workforce is more than enough to run the operation in maintenance mode, which is exactly what's being asked for.

How many dev-ops roles would it take to just keep the lights on at your org? A dozen? Three? You certainly wouldn't have a need for decision-makers or heavy lifters.

Not really, revenue seems to have fallen but not so much and it's growing again according to this: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

    2014 1.4
    2015 2.2
    2016 2.5
    2017 2.4
    2018 3
    2019 3.4
    2020 3.7
    2021 5
    2022 4.4
    2023 3.4

Number of users is actually larger than ever now:

    2015 304
    2016 313
    2017 310
    2018 298
    2019 312
    2020 347
    2021 362
    2022 401
    2023 421

I think everyone can agree this looks nothing like "collapse".

The linked article doesn’t seem to say anything about growth in revenue numbers - but it does say overall revenue has dropped 50% since Musks takeover. The quarterly chart doesn’t look great either.

Further, the brand has been tainted and Threads was allowed to pop up. Now threads is around 1/4 to 1/3 the size of Twitter MAU. It may not have replaced Twitter, but the door has been opened and that seems like an unforced error.

This election season looks poised to further drive long term disengagement as the platform is going to be very toxic and very unmoderated.

Otoh, profit might actually be up - if revenues are down 50% but costs down 80%, it may make more money. I suspect, like other private equity investments, this will not work for too long. With how much Musk has put his personal brand onto the site, it may also be difficult to unload the pieces at a profit as per the normal PE playbook.

Isn't revenue declining according to that data?

Well, based on today’s activity there is apparently some conspiracy involved.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820849880283107725?s=46&t=alZ...

"where him and maybe two other superior specimens of manhood could single handedly run the entire company" - while driving their manly cyber trucks.

Correction: "While their manly cybertrucks drive them"

Sure the site still mostly works in the technical sense

They just auto-banned everyone who downloaded their new Mac app so... no

Oh? I missed that news.

Edit:

This, I guess: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/x-kills-its-mac-app-ac...

“ If you're a Twitter diehard who's not willing to swap to X, it might be finally time to ditch X for Mastadon or Threads. On your way out, don't forget to delete your X account.” journalists are so biased against X

ofc a “journalist” just outright tells people to delete their X accounts and I get a downvote

the anti musk shit on this site is counter to logic and ideological

4Chan was run by like one guy using the change he found in the cushions of his couch.

Getting the pixels on people's screens is the easy part. Keeping the Nazis and bots at bay is the expensive part. You have to do the latter if you want to keep the advertisers on your site, which is why X switched to a more for-pay model and still loses money hand over fist. Being able to pay to have your voice amplified has been a real boon for the fascist users on X, they're having a great time.

I much prefer the Twitter of today. Since I'm a grown adult, I can handle some mean words being seen by my eyes, and just ignoring what I don't like. It's nice seeing a balance of both sides of an argument now, rather than only seeing the left biased information.

Is "left biased information" a euphemism for anything that doesn't include Nazi propaganda or hate speech? Because those are pretty much the things that were (loosely, not fully) banned prior to Elon's takeover.

but the way it works now has led to a significant decline in revenue and active users

I don' think that's completely true - MAUs are up this year, and hit 500M for the first time last Oct...

[1] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-sha...

Active users on the site is setting records pretty regularly, according to Linda. Usability and performance of the site is far higher than before in my experience as well. Revenue is down only due to an illegal cartel boycott, which X has recently filed a lawsuit to resolve.

"illegal cartel boycott"

I'm not sure what you're talking about, can you fill me in a little bit?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/6/24214536/x-elon-musk-antit...

Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds.

Except he is not suing advertisers. The Verge is fake news.

He is suing a literal cartel after their crime was exposed in congress.

I've only seen the words "illegal cartel boycott" being used (verbatim, as it were) by Musk, as well as the Twitter account of something called Rumble who are apparently joining Musk in trying to sue the advertisers who left the platform in response to it becoming too volatile to associate their brands with.

Is this the illegal cartel boycott you're talking about?

Would it not be an expression of free speech and advertisers' choice to disassociate from another entity, seen through the lens of Musk's famous free speech absolutism combined with corporate personhood? At worst, wouldn't it be the invisible hand of the free market acting to telegraph reduced demand in a resource by its previous consumers?

Government using force, whitewashed with a thin veneer of an NGO to cartelize advertisers and censor twitter is not “free speech”.

You pretended to be unaware of the situation then you straight up lie to push the dishonest narrative.

You support censorship.

This site literally bans anyone who defends conservative positions.

There’s nothing more hypocritical than leftists pretending to care about human rights.

I’m not going to indulge pretending otherwise.

You cannot lie your way into moral superiority.

I don't know what the established criteria are for 'reasonable commuting distance' in the SF Bay area, but seems like a big forced transfer like this might need a WARN act notice, which is going to get the company in the news for layoffs. And probably in the news for not providing the notice in a timely fashion, too.

This would be a bad look for a company that cared about how it looks.

SF to San Jose would be a horrible commute via car, which not everyone has.

Because they are paying SF rents? If they moved to San Jose wouldn’t they solve two problems at the same time?

"very good remote work options"

You realize Teams is pre-installed on like every windows machine, right? that's literally all you need for remote work. And most people agree that remote works is preferable/more more productive

Consider the savings to add 15hr/wk of commute time to the onsite workforce. Yikes

Does any employer factor this in? That's the employee's time/expense, not the company's. After all, SF is one of the cities with the worst traffic (to say nothing of the cost of living)

I don't know US commutes, or US geography too well. But it seems these two locations are about 45mins-1hr drive from each other.

Where do folks actually live in those areas? Is it that a 30min drive north to San Fran becomes a 30min drive south to San Jose?

More like the easy commute you had in San Francisco on muni (the bus and subway network of San Francisco) becomes an annoying hour and a half-long commute on bart (The regional train system) with 2-3 transfers

Until Boring Company sets up multiple pickup points with Loop and Hyperloop tunnels; then will arguably be a max 20-30 minute ride.

The dynamics of travel will dramatically change multiple industries, save for if the status quo establishment and industrial complexes through regulatory capture prevent the rapid expansion of the paradigm shift in transport that Boring Company is rapidly developing; the technology of which Elon needs for his Mars colony, and so it'll happen and be developed as far as is determined to be necessary to maximize its utility and safety.

How big is their network so far?

I haven't looked into it recently, however their Las Vegas network is going and expanding; 40 million people per year travel to Vegas, a great testbed and for exposure.

Why is the number of people in LA relevant when the ridership peak is 1,355 an hour.

I wouldn't bring up the Las Vegas network if you're trying to advocate for the boring company, it's quite possibly the worst system of transportation that's ever been created. A farce in every aspect, benefiting no one.

I used the underground Tesla thing to get between the halls of the convention center during NAB - it was pretty reasonable, but not really scalable...

This is not the sort of thing you should measure on an individual user experience basis. Try running the numbers for the system, it would essentially get beaten by a medium-sized bus in capacity and times, at a fraction of the cost.

Not to mention the large delta between what was promised versus what was delivered. There's probably a good case for fraud, if it were not for the fact that the purchasers want to save face they could probably sue.

Is that the one that’s just teslas driving in a pretty normal tunnel at fairly unimpressive speeds & throughput?

Hey dang, what exactly in my comment above warrants -5 (or more) downvotes?

Extreme sycophancy without much critical thought.

Might as well argue he’s going to give all his employees time machines to go buy $AAPL in the 90s as part of their comp plan. Would also get downvoted.

"Extreme sycophancy without much critical thought."

A claim you make with no supportive arguments.

My comment is packed with critical thought. Maybe you're just lacking understanding to unpack it? Or are you too arrogant to not think that you know all?

And then ridiculous ad hominem that you think was clever enough to actually waste time to type out; what work do you have that you hate that you're procrastinating from working on?

I'm really curious if you know what sycophancy means, and if so, how exactly my comment is benefitting me? I think it's more likely you're jealous of Elon's success, have past trauma from personal work experiences you're projecting onto him, and taking it out on anyone who notes his successes and extrapolates to estimate where his projects will lead to.

You’re telling people to commute with a thing that doesn’t and very unlikely ever will exist?

https://www.boringcompany.com/vegas-loop - doesn't exist?

This is a very anti-Musk thread and generally anti-Musk crowd. Pro-Musk comments should be expected to be downvoted, unfortunately. It's days like these one has to be brave and burn some magical internet karma points in order to present an opposing view and to call out the one-sided discussions.

You need CalTrain to get to San Jose. BART should have gone all the way around the bay by now but CalTrain defends its turf like a honey badger.

They still haven't finished that leg? I was there 7 years ago and the plan was advertised on the maps.

You can take Caltrain to San Jose. I did this commute for several years when I lived in SF and worked in SJ. With electrification coming top Caltrain this fall, it should be faster than the current diesel trains. Depending on where Twitter's offices are in Palo Alto and San Jose, it probably won't be that bad.

Are they upgrading the tracks as well? Diesel trains can run at 80mph no problem, which is about the maximum any standard US railroad supports. If the track is built to high speed standards you could go faster.

The track has a lot of at-grade intersections with roads running through the mid-peninsula - it seems unlikely they'll be running trains at 80mph.

If they relocate engineers to Palo Alto, that's halfway between San Francisco and San Jose. And a lot of engineers (not necessarily at X but in general in Silicon Valley) live in the suburbs between SF and SJ already. It might be mildly less convenient for some, but also mildly more convenient for many.

The Bay area is fairly constrained in terms of transportation. Commuting in a car is not possible (unless you enjoy deadlock traffic + paying for parking). Public transportation exists but only works on specific segments.

I would guess a large portion of the individuals in the SF office would live within SF/East bay and have a fairly reasonable commute going to the SF office. I am not sure how far Bart goes south now but typically you would take Caltrain so thats a 45min ride from SF to Palo Alto. Then tack on however long it takes you to get to Caltrain. Easily a 1hr commute.

Commuting in a car is not possible because most people do it, I suppose.

I'm imagining hordes of 20-something engineers living in the Mission with a 15 minute flat bicycle commute to the X office now having to grapple with getting to San Jose. Probably pretty rough news for a decent amount of people.

they will just work remote

Are they permitted to?

I’m surprised they haven’t fully jump shipped to a lower COL state.

Musk already moved Tesla, and is in the process of moving SpaceX, to Texas. It's surprising X isn't following suit.

According to my friend, Tesla engineering didn't move to Texas, and he doesn't want to give up the California weather, so unlikely to make the move. If you have a routine, and enjoy year-long pretty nice weather, California will just have a natural advantage.

Did San Jose agree to let them use their incredibly obnoxious blinking X logo eyesore?

‘SHUT IT OFF!!’ Disruptive new ‘X’ logo removed in San Francisco:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/31/twitter...

Construction crews dismantled the giant, blinking ‘X’ logo after 24 complaints were logged with the city

San Jose is much more permissive than San Francisco when it comes to shitty public art:

San Jose’s Quetzalcoatl: The story behind much-ridiculed poop statue:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/23/san-joses-quetzalcoat...

The new HQ should have a giant neon poo emoji for a sign.

Made out of real poo!

Thats why they are leaving SF

As a UK chap, can someone give me their opinion on if San Jose is a more pleasant place to live than San Fran these days?

Both are quite boring mid-size cities that are heavily overpriced for what they offer. SF is more exciting/prettier yet less safe than SJ.

The 17th largest city in the US is mid-sized?

From my perspective living in Asia I’d place it on par with a small rural village

After I moved to Beijing, my first job was at a company opening a network of village banks. The villages had a population of around 1 million. SF has 850k people.

There's a theoretical limit of 1400 villages in the entire country at that size, and that's assuming zero population in cities. I don't see how it can be true.

If a village has 1 mil, then China is probably entirely made up of something like 40 cities and 500 villages, plus some smaller stuff.

This is a very funny comment. Small rural villages in China do not have 61 story buildings.

Non-major cities do, but not “small rural villages”.

The city of San Jose is spread over a huge area (a good fraction of Santa Clara Valley aka Silicon Valley). The downtown area of San Jose which you might think of as a city is rather small.

San Jose is very much a suburbia-type city, very spread out, downtown is rather small and you need a car 90% of the time, whereas SF is much denser.

I assume the drug use/homeless issues are less prevalent in San Jose, at least it was that way 10 yrs ago.

suburbia-type city

Isn't this oxymoron? Isn't city the `urbia`?

No, cities are not only the super dense large cities. Smaller cities exist too, and are comparable to the suburbs of large cities in their feel.

No, those are called towns, because they're not actually cities if they don't have the density to support city-grade amenities.

Given that the OP was from the UK, a "city" is a town with a cathedral. Nothing more, nothing less.

That's a myth.

https://youtu.be/Whqs8v1svyo

I don't have time to watch your youtube, however it's not really a myth, just no longer true. There was definitely a long period of time when it was kind of true. I say kind of because it's specifically a diocesan cathedral.

While it's hard to make definitive statements about when a lot of cities originally became cities, it was first formalised in the 16th century, and at that time all the cities were cathedral towns (or more accurately, they were diocesan cathedrals meaning that churches in other towns in that diocese were administered by that cathedral), and significantly in many cases these cities were smaller than other towns in the diocese. The important part was that these particular towns with cathedrals that had always been called cities for as long as anyone remembered were recognised as cities by the Crown, and other towns were not allowed that status. Later on, Henry VIII created new dioceses and granted those towns (and they also all happened to have cathedrals) city status as well. So, at that time at least, there was a strong precedent that city status and being a diocesan cathedral town were linked, and in fact people were told that cities were cities because of this, even though technically towns became cities only by Royal decree and dioceses were only created by separate Royal decree, but historically both were done at the same time.

This understanding was only really challenged in the early 19th century, when some more towns with cathedrals became new dioceses and their local governments assumed they were now cities and renamed themselves as such. Clearly, the Crown wasn't too worried about this as it took nearly two decades for this to be noticed (and only happened in the context of a Royal visit to one of the cities), at which point there was an act of parliament specifically to confer city status on these new large towns that were already calling themselves cities, again reinforcing the people's understanding that towns with diocesan cathedrals should be called cities.

The interesting stuff happened at the end of the 19th century, when some of the other new diocesan towns that were quite small decided the also wanted the prestige of being a city, but were told they were too small to justify it and rightly complained that other cities were even smaller, but they weren't going to be downgraded to towns because they had always been called cities as long as anyone knew. And then Birmingham, the third largest town/city in the country petitioned to be a city on the basis of its important, and was recognised, at which point the link between city and cathedral was broken down. After that, a few more large towns also successfully petitioned for city status based on size or historical importance.

It can be said that the link between city status and cathedrals was firmly broken in 1974, when all existing cities lost their city status, and towns had to apply for city status along with justifications. This was re-granted to all the existing cities (actually, I've got a vague recollection that at least one didn't bother and lost its city status), and at the same time city boundaries were redefined to include the metropolitan areas that would previously have been considered towns or villages in their own right.

So, in one sense the assertion that towns with cathedrals are cities isn't quite true, and is definitely wrong now, but about hundreds of years this was actually the case. Arguably, correlation doesn't imply causation, but the Crown seemingly made an effort for a long time to ensure that the correlation held to ensure the set of cities was exactly identical to the set of diocesan cathedral towns. So, it's also not a myth.

My advice: Never move to San Jose.

They are very different propositions.

San Jose: your average American city, in terms of looks, but considerably more upscale.

San Francisco: an NYC-style "world-class city." It's trying for that title in terms of tempo, density, architecture.

Doesn't always succeed of course, but the cities are fundamentally going after different goals.

So he's not moving X to Texas? Or is this just the preliminary move?

It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes.

I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.

I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin.

As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office).

Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.

I’d be curious to know:

- how folks who work at X think about this move?

- how much remote work will be allowed?

- tax savings.

- lease savings.

I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.

during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away from the windows, as there was shooting outside.

About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks.

I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until the parent comment.

[flagged]

SF certainly has its challenges. But in my 9 years of working in the financial district I never saw something like this.

Obviously others will have different experiences than me.

Point is, you can find crime and bad things in any city. San Francisco has work to do, but isn't the hell-hole people or the news make it out to be.

Thats odd because SF _has_ been the hell-hole people and the media have described it as in my own experiences.

It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged.

I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.

I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.

That phenomenon isn't isolated to San Francisco, nor even to the US. The same mindset is also widespread in "progressive" Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, for example.

From what I can tell, one of the main pillars of the "progressive" ideology that's prevalent in such cities is that certain specific groups of people are declared to be "victims" or "disadvantaged", and these people are put on a pedestal and held in high esteem for some reason, no matter how awful they behave in public.

I suspect that most "progressives" inherently know that these sanctified people aren't the "victims" they're ideologically portrayed as being. Even if the "progressives" don't openly admit it, they themselves don't like dodging human feces on the sidewalk, nor the stench of urine emanating from building walls, nor used needles left in parks, nor addicts overdosing in bus shelters, nor smelly unwashed hobos sleeping on public transit, nor aggressive panhandlers demanding money from passersby, nor crucial retail stores closing due to rampant shoplifting, and so forth.

Yet, these "progressives" seem unwilling to admit that this main pillar of their ideology is fundamentally wrong. Perhaps they know that if they admit this, even to themselves, then the rest of their belief system will inevitably come crashing down because it, too, isn't built on reality.

I honestly think people like ahuth honestly don't see these sorts of things. I've found that a substantial portion of people who live in my lovely city of Portland for example, simply are not very good at observation, and will happily walk by incredibly dangerous situations and never notice. I've had to point out to my very progressive in-laws for example, needles in parks, drug deals in broad daylight, guns, etc, that they honestly just do not see. This complete lack of awareness is very common among a certain subset of residents, especially in cities, and probably explains why they vote the way they do.

I'm not sure how to go about teaching situational awareness, but I imagine voting patterns would change if people were aware at all.

Perhaps these situations just aren't as dangerous as you think? I can understand not wanting to see drug deals happening out in the open, but it's less of a threat to your personal safety than crossing a busy street.

SF is a deeply challenging city, and you really appreciate this by traveling and visiting other cities. You are constantly on alert, in ways that simply you are not in other places despite the fact that there are “good and bad” parts of town everywhere else.

Perhaps caused by the unpredictability in SF of often finding “bad” in “good” parts of town, with unpredictable drug addict behavior on top, which adds to the unpredictability of the bad experiences.

Anecdotally, my family got assaulted with a hammer in a “good” part of town, while carrying our 6 months old in a stroller. The individual was visibly on drugs. There is no amount of “bad” in other cities that results in hammering and smashing the back window of a car - assaulting a young family and traumatizing a newborn - for nothing. It’s unwarranted violence, it wasn’t even a robbery. I travel 150k miles a year all over the world, including 3rd world countries, and I have only felt unsafe in San Francisco.

And I have a lot more examples like this one. A friend of mine got assaulted with a baseball bat in SoMa by an individual that wanted to steal their dog for drug money, for example.

The whole town is a social experiment where we put families and working individuals into a drug den and see what happens.

These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though. I can find similar stories in my relatively small but dense suburb. The statistics just do not back up the claims that SF is uniquely dangerous or has worse problems than anywhere else of that size/density.

These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though.

But they are, because this is city that has established a record $1B+/year budget to solve the problem, without setting up a rigorous process to be accountable on how that money is being spent, with corruption cases (and arrests) linked to the recipients of those public funds [1][2].

Quite unique, indeed.

I live and have an engineering office in SOMA and I've had the exact opposite experience.

In 8 years living here my dog has been viciously attacked twice, we've had people attack us on the Embarcadero and around the sidewalks and parks in our neighborhood, and just yesterday I was lamenting that there was a time in my past where I wasn't comfortable around drug use. Now when I walk out of my office and see someone smoking whatever or I injecting whatever else it's just normal to me.

That's the problem in this city, living like this, all of us, normalizes all these things that shouldn't be.

Because in reality, as in statistically, SF is actually not that dangerous.

People say this about any vaguely blue city, which is almost all of them. But they forget Urban areas are very dense. You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America. It's just very hard to see that because the coverage isn't there and the actual amount of deaths is lower.

Per capita is such a stupid way to measure shooting danger. What really matters is average proximity to shootings (which does measure danger, since proximity to the bullet could lead to you getting killed, or the shooter aiming in another close direction). Obviously, this is higher in dense areas, hence the higher perceived danger.

Case in point, if you have a rural area of 1000 people and there are 10 shootings (1% shooting rate), the likelihood that any of the 980 people not involved was near any of those shooting is very low.

On the other hand, a 4 block stretch of a city with a 1000 people with ten shootings, you can bet that all 1000 heard / saw / were affected by the shootings.

Cities need to be safer than other places in order to feel safe. And until people get this obvious fact, cities will always have this reputation.

Right, but I'm saying there's a disconnect between perception and reality. The reputation cities have is based on their perception and not necessarily reality.

You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.

To be fair, cities do also generally have MUCH more public services available. They have shelters, food banks, and free mental health facilities out the wazoo as compared to rural areas. But there's only so much you can do.

You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.

Absent a few violent neighborhoods, the American homicide rate is on par with places without guns at all. Nevertheless, homicide rate is pretty inversely correlated with amount of quality of life policing. Giuliani made New York city incredibly safe, one of the safest cities in the world, despite the preponderance of guns. Policing works. Consistent prosecution works. Continued imprisonment for those who are clearly dangerous works. The net economic benefit (not to even mention the environmental ones) is more effective than any welfare program

What really matters is average proximity to shootings

Social proximity. Less than 10% of homicides are from strangers [1]

[1]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a random by stander are unlikely to be the target. However, again, a targeted shooting in a spread out locale is less dangerous than one that happens a few feet from you for the simple reason that the bullet can miss

I think you must live in a city. Literally everyone in your 1000 people rural area would be affected by 10 shootings.

You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America.

Isn’t the vast majority of gun violence suicide? Because if that’s the case than your statement is disingenuous, you’re not less safe in rural America if you’re worried about being shot on the way to the office.

Fascinating how suicides are creatively included in "gun violence."

Like how suicide by opiates is included in "overdoses"?

To be clear on this - people pout about these suicides being considered a firearm death. They are.

They may not be "gun violence" against another, but they're still a firearm death.

Just as someone (and I've seen it several times, as a paramedic) who takes a lethal amount of opiates to commit suicide rather than for recreational use is still considered an overdose death.

It's not "recreational drug abuse", but it's still an overdose death.

Agree or object to both, or none. Guns don't just get a special pass such that shooting yourself with a pistol is somehow not a death by firearm.

"Pout?"

Nobody said these weren't "firearm deaths" - they're not "gun violence" regardless of how badly you want them to be for this strawman to work.

The problem comes when folks lump all of these deaths together and then attempt to legislate based on these inflated numbers: it's intellectually dishonest.

Someone choosing to kill themselves cannot impact my Constitutionally-enumerated rights.

There is a gun, and it's violent. And keep in mind suicide isn't always clear-cut.

What about a 13 year old boy who grabs the gun from the safe? This could have been prevented, and it's also suicide. This is a rather common scenario, too.

Here's what Black's Law Dictionary has to say:

*violence.* Unjust or unwarranted exercise of force, usually with accompaniment of vehemence, outrage, or fury. People v. McIlvain, 55 Cal.App.2d 322, 130 P.2d 131, 134. Physical force unlawfully exercised; abuse of force; that force which is employed against common right, against the laws, and against public liberty. Anderson-Berney Bldg. Co. v. Lowry, Tex.Civ.App., 143 S.W.2d 401, 403. The exertion of any physical force so as to injure, damage or abuse. See e.g. Assault.

Violence in labor disputes is not limited to physical contact or injury, but may include picketing conducted with misleading signs, false statements, publicity, and veiled threats by words and acts. Esco Operating Corporation v. Kaplan, 144 Misc. 646, 258 N.Y.S. 303.

[Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 1570]

---

There's a stark difference between randomly being killed by someone else (i.e.: during a stick-up robbery in the Tenderloin) and consciously choosing to end one's own life: intentional blurring of these lines is often an exercise in bad faith.

These conversations are typically held under the frame that "gun violence" is a valid reason to abridge a Constitutionally-enumerated right.

Suicide, accidental mishandling, etc. are "user error" - not remotely-valid reasons to amend the Constitution or to chip away at rights using legislation. (Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions.)

"Likely to die" is a loaded phrase: why is one person of sound mind more "likely" to commit suicide in a rural area? (Is it that boring?)

I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger...

Like forcing them to drive to the office 2-5 days each week when they could continue working from home?

vs "I never understood why the company would not pay taxes to improve the environment around its chosen home"?

Like paying $2m for a public bathroom?

*300k in reality: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-fran...