Will the remote working boom turn San Francisco into a mere stopping point on life’s journey?

Covid has upended everything, but it’s interesting to consider the things it hasn’t changed that much.

Pre-pandemic, the startup I worked for had a relatively lax approach to working from the office. There was an office in San Francisco’s financial district, but my manager lived in Los Angeles, a six-hour drive away.

My friends at other tech companies reported similarly lax approaches to in-person work requirements.

Once we had a quiet place and a fast internet connection, our bosses, by and large, didn’t care where we worked.

Tech is an industry, one manager told me, where you’re measured by your outputs, not by your inputs. So long as we hit our goals and deadlines, the company didn’t much care how we did it, where from, or what hours we worked.

This meant tremendous flexibility.

If we wanted to visit our families, or go hiking on the weekends, we could do so – and still take meetings on the road.

One year, when fire season was particularly bad, an asthmatic friend of mine decamped to clearer pastures for a month, rather than be stuck in the smoke.

Because of this, our work lives didn’t change all that much once Covid hit. A lot of my friends moved back in with their parents, or left cities with high taxes for cheaper towns where you could get to know your neighbours.

We didn’t have to go through the same types of adjustments that so many other workers had to – such as downloading Zoom for the first time, or trying to find a quiet corner of our homes to take calls from.

A common topic of discussion among tech workers, debated over on distanced walks and Zoom happy hours, is will San Francisco ever come back and assume its position as the jewel of Silicon Valley? Many tech workers left the city during Covid, and it remains to be seen how many will come back.

A history of this area is really a history of technical innovation of the last 80 years – everything from radar and GPS to microchips and the iPhone. The question, though, is to what extent those inventions required people to share the same physical space. Can you invent new technology, raise money, hire and motivate the right people, all on Zoom?

Other tech cities are watching San Francisco for the answer.

From Silicon Docks in Dublin to Tel Aviv’s Silicon Wadi, companies around the world are still figuring out the right balance of in-person work and remote collaboration.

The question of whether tech cities are central places where ambitious people ought to live, or just meccas to which one should make the occasional pilgrimage, will inform a lot of how these cities grow and change over time.

My own take on the question is that while there are benefits to working in-person early in one’s career, most tech workers can probably go remote for most of the time without a meaningful dip in productivity.

For people new to tech, there are a lot of benefits to in-person work, but the marginal utility in living in one of these tech cities diminishes over time.

I suspect that living in a tech city will be like going to college: valuable for many reasons, but not a forever move. Eventually, you’ll want to leave and start your next chapter in life.

University is an excellent time to learn, to meet people, and to discover what drives you – but it isn’t real life. I suspect living in a big tech city to be similar.

Living in San Francisco is a great way to break into the tech industry, to gain valuable skills and make connections, but in many ways it’s not an ideal place to start a family. I suspect we’ll see a lot of people spending a few years in Silicon Valley early in their career, or visiting for short bursts of fundraising or hiring.

My bet is that we see more companies started outside of San Francisco in the next 10 years, with tech workers dispersing to other parts of the US.

For what it’s worth, though, my take is somewhat at odds with the company I currently work for.

They think something valuable is lost when you only know your co-workers as squares in a Brady Bunch video call.

When it’s safe to do so, management tells us, the expectation will be that you work from the office three to four days per week.

I’m happy with their decision – largely because I’m happier and more productive in an office environment. I’m also happy, perhaps owing to a contrarian streak inherited from my father, that I work for a company that’s going against the grain.

With some startups requiring workers to be back in the office, and others being remote-friendly, we have an imperfect A/B test going on. I’m excited to see the results.

Tommy Collison is a writer and Irish expat living in the Bay Area