Hello,
On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 10:07 PM, Aleksey Bilogur aleksey.bilogur@gmail.com wrote:
A logistical non-starter! They've got 200+ staff members, any gains to recruitment competitiveness will be quickly lost to the drain that losing whatever significant percent of the staff that doesn't make the move incurs on the organization.
I don't think it's that clear-cut.
A large part of the Product & Engineering staff is already working remotely, so they wouldn't be affected by the change. Many SF-based staffers also work remotely some of the time, and there are constant efforts being made to make the organization more remote-friendly; it wouldn't be a stretch to become a remote-first organization, to split to smaller offices, to relocate entirely, or all of the above.
Some WMF employees followed the WMF from St Petersburg, FL to San Francisco during the 2007 relocation. I expect that this would also happen to some extent if the WMF were to relocate and/or split to smaller distributed offices. San Francisco isn't just expensive for the WMF; it's expensive for employees as well, and some of them may find it beneficial to move to a less expensive area, especially as they start families.
In addition to the insanely high cost of living in the San Francisco area, there are other reasons that make relocation a viable long-term solution. The main that come to mind are geological instability (the bay area /will/ be struck by major earthquakes in the medium term) and ecological conditions (i.e. the multi-year drought and its anticipated socio-ecological consequences). Planning for continuity means taking these concerns into account in any medium- and long-term strategy thinking.
As Oliver mentioned, an East-coast office could make sense in this context. Technical staff is somewhat distributed around the globe, but in contrast the head (leadership) and backbone (finance, admin and HR) of the WMF is concentrated in the San Francisco office. In the current situation, it would take months or years to recover from a major disaster. Transitioning to several (2+) smaller, distributed offices would make the organization a lot more resilient, geographically and functionally.
All this to say: it is possible, even probably desirable, for the WMF to consider relocating out of the Bay Area in the long term (in whole or in part), so entertaining the idea is a valid train of thought.