Tech Relocation Debate

I work for a tech company in San Francisco and would gladly relocate to a cheaper city if the company allowed us to work remotely or had other satellite offices. Unfortunately, the satellite offices we do have seem to be dedicated towards specific departments, which doesn't help me.

Employment is very high right now so people are pretty comfortable and don't have a big need to put a lot of effort in finding a new job. In other words, companies really need to sell a new job.That combined with a housing market that is actually not great in terms of sky rocketing prices and increasing interest rates means that a lot of people would have to take financial risks moving and would have to risk a downgrade of their current situation. Especially if they already have a house.

I'd suggest that you research why it's necessary for companies to cram so much demand for housing in a few areas.It's seems absurd in this day and age that we're still concentrating business to such an extent in places like the NY Metro Area and the Bay Area. IBM in the olden times leveraged locating facilities in nowheresville as a competitive advantage. I'm surprised it isn't catching on now that engineers are being so highly compensated.

I assume it's a simple matter of real-estate price. There's lots of empty land in the area, and we all know how expensive stuff has gotten towards downtown. Also, many of the stodgier/enterprise-y big tech companies are up north (Dell, HP, GM, Oracle, etc.) which I assume is at least partly due to proximity to the suburbs. Older employees probably care more about that than exploring.

I don't think the almost anywhere assumption holds for several reasons - a bad cultural climate can be a sure turn off (anti-intellecutalism and open bigotry), a "good" one can be a pleasure, and employees prefer to have plenty of alternative employers.There are multiple reasond - security from layoffs or bad workplaces, job-hopping is the defacto way to raise salary, and it also keeps them having to compete for them some.A middle of nowhere job sets off "it's a t

This is making finding people for our (large but non tech) company (not in a high tech area) very difficult; we never paid those kind of salaries (cost of living here is much lower) but now you no longer need to be local to work for us, so we have to compete with these high paying companies which our company cannot afford to. It takes the location requirements out of the picture entirely. This is going to kill SF and to a lesser extant, NY, to no longer have these high tax paying employees, but

I just wonder why all of them have to be in the most expensive part of the US. Tech talent might be more accessible in SF but support staff and marketing shouldn't be. Having offices in a cheaper location would not only save the company money but also be potentially nicer for employees. It would probably cut most people's commute time and increase cost-adjusted salaries.

Companies put their offices in expensive cities because that’s where most of the people who work for them want to live. If Google decided to move their HQ to rural Kansas tomorrow, most of the company would quit overnight.

1) Facebook or Google already have offices in Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin and other lower-priced locales.2) The moving scenario works great for single people with no attachments, less so for married people with non-Facebook and non-Google spouses, even less so for such married people living in a school district they like.3) Even with a single non-attached engineer, how many are company men dreaming about retiring from the same company they work for nowadays? How many are just using Facebo

it's simple.The employees are a self-selected population for the area.The employees that work for a company have already decided that is where they want to live and work.They could just open an additional office in a more "reasonable" place, say somewhere with lower taxes, lower cost of living, shitty weather and fewer qualified employees...Also, I've often wondered if locating a company in somewhere with a nosebleed cost of living like SF is a way to exclu