The Flight of the Techies Won’t Be the End of Silicon Valley
Pandemic telecommuting has made high rents look pointless, but northern California companies will be just fine.
Hi, this is Laura Bliss from Bloomberg CityLab, the latest addition to the Bloomberg Media family, covering all things cities. Signs of Silicon Valley’s telecommuting future were here long before the pandemic. Newspaper headlines go back to the 1990s about California tech workers setting up home offices in more affordable West Coast locales, then taking the quick plane trip back for a weekly meeting or two. In recent years some startups were making a splash for their remote-only policies, and at least one offered a “de-location package” to incentivize moves anywhere with lower housing costs.
But just as often, remote work overhauls didn’t pan out. Yahoo, Best Buy Co., Reddit Inc. and others all reversed course on flexible work arrangements in the past decade. It turns out there’s a reason that the largest Silicon Valley companies designed their campuses to keep workers on site for as many hours as possible. Meanwhile, Bay Area rents have climbed ceaselessly higher.