Bay Area office situation
I happened to be driving through Santa Clara today. I was surprised to see large scale office construction - including new office construction projects that kicked off well AFTER the start of the pandemic - are in full gear! Will there be a massive return to office or massive hybrid programs in place in the near future? P.S. Nvidia new campus looks crazy good!
A lot of big companies had hybrid model for ICs, senior engineers, even before covid. It was common for experienced folks to wfh 2+ days of the week.
That’s a classic example of the sunk cost fallacy.
Blind probably leans heavily towards SWEs but there are a lot of people who need to do their jobs in office or where being co-located dramatically improves efficiency. I'm excited to see what happens at remote-first companies, but for many companies, it's going to take a long time before they build norms that allow for asynchronous communication and business continuity.
Denial stage of grief for the in office model that was already sick with bay area housing shortage and then died of COVID. and improving communication tools.
How's the remote flexibility at Nvidia? Thinking about applying once my year is complete at 🍎.
Nothing announced but a lot of people were doing it even before COVID. Largely between employee and manager and role dependent.
"including new office construction projects that kicked off well AFTER the start of the pandemic - are in full gear!" Are you really so naive that you believe construction which has started recently is guaranteed to have been planned since after the pandemic started? These things could've been planned for a couple of years and just now starting actual construction, who knows.
No genius, I am not that naive. There are many ways to change course in construction and many ways to draft agreements that offer options to change course. Not to mention the COVID onset is considered “force majeure”, which is built into almost all major contracts. If work from office was going to disappear, there’s no way those new office construction projects would have started. Think about it genius.
Nobody thinks work from office is going to disappear for all roles. These offices will still have use for certain teams, and maybe it will even allow the companies building them to close or move out of larger offices to go to these new ones.
IMHO way too much money tied in offices/office construction/renovation to let it all go. I think a lot of companies will offer "hybrid" but the unwritten expectation will be to come in every day. Might be wrong, but I got a feeling.