hiring in lower-cost cities like Austin and Minneapolis
https://www.businessinsider.com/online-personal-styling-company-stitch-fix-is-laying-off-1400-2020-6
No surprises. Who is buying clothes right now?
Only need a good shirt for a Zoom meeting, and even less for drinking on the couch watching Netflix.
>>Who is buying clothes right now?
I don't think it's just that. Notice this:
QuoteThe employees affected can stay with the San Francisco-based company if they relocate — Stitch Fix will start hiring for 2,000 positions in lower-cost cities this summer.
A lot of value propositions have just changed (universities are completely screwed, but that's another topic). On this topic: if my California workers are not coming into the office, why do I have offices in California at California rents paying California wages?
I think a lot of companies will realize they do not need to be in Silicon Valley anymore. Automattic, Streak, and many other distributed companies have realized this already. Now that every company in California is de facto distributed, they are realizing it too.
>why do I have offices in California at California rents paying California wages?
And it is not just the wages. In heavily regulated states compliance issues in HR, environment, etc. come at a significant cost.
>>I think a lot of companies will realize they do not need to be in Silicon Valley anymore
It is looking like all our offices (including Bay Area) will stay mostly closed for at least the remainder of 2020. We aren't expecting anyone to be back working full time in the offices for quite a while. Makes me wonder if they will look for much smaller office spaces moving forward, have employees come in on staggered schedules (i.e. group A is in Monday and Wednesday, group B is in Tuesday, Thursday) or do something like that. The company is performing quite well with everyone working from home right now so I expect to see the work from home aspect of the company increase substantially moving forward.
I wouldn't think they would abandon the Bay Area all together but I wouldn't be surprised if there are some sort of changes.
Quote from: DrCool on June 03, 2020, 06:48:31 PM
>>group A is in Monday and Wednesday, group B is in Tuesday, Thursday
I've been wondering about that too. At my workplace, most offices are overcrowded, meaning that there are two of us in my office, which 10 years ago had one person. Pre-covid, it fits with no problem. Two desks, a bookcase, file cabinets, my workout stuff and various detritus. It didn't seem tight at all and my office mates is one of my favorite people in the world.
So I start to think...
- part of the reason I like to actually go into an office is because my officemate is there. If he's not, the "social plus" of going to the office starts to disappear. In our case, we do not collaborate though, so it's workable.
- The office next door has three people who do collaborate. If they come in on some sort of rotation, what's the point of coming in?
So it's going to take a lot of rethinking of workspaces. You'll have to put an M/W HR person in with a Tu/Th marketing person or a M/W operations person in with a Th/Th engineering person, which means that much of the collaboration that arises from being there in person is broken.
>>You'll have to put an M/W HR person in with a Tu/Th marketing person or a M/W operations person in with a Th/Th engineering person
I was thinking they could do it by departments so have accounting and buying come in on M/W and marketing and design come in Tu/Th or something along those lines. So most of the people that need to collaborate would have at least some time together in the office. It would probably be an end to everyone's designated workspace and there would have to be some desk sharing which would create its own set of problems.
Our offices (at least the ones I have seen) aren't incredibly crowded as it is. It wouldn't take too much work to space things out a bit. Conference rooms can get a bit crowded with some larger groups so some of the bigger meetings would have to be from a couple different rooms.
Since I work from home 100% of the time it doesn't affect me really but office life will definitely be a bit different whenever they get back to the offices.
I wonder what happens to the new people when everyone is working from home.
"Don't be so quick to convince your company that your job can be performed completely from home indefinitely, because that means it can be performed from another country City."