Moving an office like this scenario and timeline can and in most cases, does cause tectonic shift in the company's dynamic. There's a ripple effect through far reaching aspects of the employees lives that effect there work.
On another note-
Office location can be the most personal aspect of business to an exec processing the decision. A territorial undercurrent is in play.
In my experience you always loose employees when moving offices. It's a really weird feeling just after the move and takes a while to get back into the grove.
Last place I worked, we moved just a few blocks away, from a really, really awful crappy warehouse in Sunnyvale to a pretty spiffy new facility also in Sunnyvale. I don't think we lost anyone due to that move. So, lesson is to make sure your new office is awesome and not that geographically far from your old one?
Sunnyvale is a bit of a different story because I assume everyone is driving to an office in Sunnyvale, at least the last mile, so you can move a mile and not impact anyone that much.
Up in SF, moving the office one mile can add 30 minutes to some people's daily commutes each way.
Absolutely. If lots of reddit's employees are living in the East Bay (feasible since the office is in Soma), a company move to Daly City would make their commute an absolute nightmare. A normal BART ride would turn into a reallllly long BART ride (if the office is anywhere near the station) or a soulcrushing commute over the bridge. I commuted from the Sunset District (essentially Daly City) to Oakland for a year and it was horrendous.
Meanwhile, moving from one office to another within Sunnyvale won't change much considering there are many ways to get in and out of there.
Not geographically far can limit you to a tiny distance if you have commuters on caltrain, bart, and muni. Lots of people scoff at the change going from a 5 minute walk from the transportation depot to a 15 minute walk makes, but that made me leave a company. Of course, virtually nobody doing that walk fails to understand, but execs drive.
My last company was the first place I've worked that moved offices while I was there, and we definitely experienced a 'weird feeling' and we lost a bunch of people. Everything just felt off after the move, even though things went smoothly, and our new space was objectively much nicer (upgraded from thoroughly class C space to a nice class A building).
I was trying to stick it out and wait for the culture and mood (which had been fantastic beforehand) to get back in the groove, but our best people started to leave one by one, then one of the founders of my current company reached out to me personally, and it was too hard to pass up.
The key element in moving offices is buy-in. It affects everybody. If you treat your employees like they're part of the furniture during the planning phase then you're going to have exactly the effect you describe. Not saying that was the case but I would not be surprised if it was.
At my old company, as the lease at our slightly too small and horribly boring office park was set to renew, moving was floated.
Everyone in the office was immediately for it. However, the CEO and a few other key employees were thinking further out in the southeastern suburbs, and everyone else assumed that meant into the city, centrally located, with cheaper rents.
We ended up staying in the office park that no one really liked.
However, the CEO and a few other key employees were thinking further out in the southeastern suburbs
A company I worked at in the 90s moved their office from downtown Chicago to the suburbs, seemingly so the executives would have a shorter commute. As a consulting firm, most of the employees were younger, didn't have families, and lived in the city and so ended up leaving the company when their commute changed. They also had trouble recruiting because of the new location. Having the only office in the suburbs didn't last long and they had to re-open a downtown office.
Daly City is a world away from 520 3rd. There is nothing of any kind worth mentioning in Daly City. There is culture, entertainment, education, recreation, and all the benefits of real city life steps away from Reddit's current office. In addition the building at 520 3rd has a tradition of housing famous Internet companies.
and, more importantly, bart is only convenient in a very narrow corridor of sf, so this could be turning 15-25 minute commutes into hour plus commutes, spanning two transport systems in sf. A recipe to make your employees hate it.
As someone completely unaffiliated with San Francisco, all of this honestly just makes the employees sound like primadonnas. While it may be cool to be "steps away" from that stuff you listed (and I doubt you're being fair to Daly City), it certainly shouldn't make or break a job that you're otherwise happy with.
I understand the argument about exacerbating commutes (even though it sounds crazy for a short-distance move) but I think this one is quite weak.
There are 24 hours in a day.
You should be sleeping for ~8 of those leaving 16.
Assuming you are supposed to be at the office for 8 hours (pipe dream, but let's just go for it) that leaves 8 hours of time for other stuff.
If you previously had a great 15-30 minute commute then you would have 7 hours of free time to work on side projects and do things you want to do. That would be a pretty sweet normal life.
Adding an extra hour to the commute cuts your free time down by ~30%. That is a big deal.
I also find it very helpful to include any time spent commuting as "working time" when considering where to work. You should also consider the increased cost to commute from a more like this. An extra hour of driving 5 days/week represents a non-trivial amount of money. So the salary needs to compensate, or the time at the office needs to go down.
No matter how you look at this, a move like this is asking all of the employees on the short end of the stick to effectively take home less money (not exactly a pay cut, but the end result is the same).
Edit: oh and I'm not from SF, I live in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. This has nothing to do with SF.
Early November: "jk, we're moving to Daly City."
Even though Daly City is a BART away, the fact that this decision happened in 1 month is absurd.